
COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



Beside the New-Made 
Grave 



Beside the New-Made 
Grave 



A Correspondence. 



BY 

F. H. TURNER 



BOSTON 
JAMES H. WEST COMPANY 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two Cooies Received 

MAY 28 1906 

* Copyright Entry 
CLASS / O/XXc. No, 
^ COPY B, 



Copyright, 1906 
James H. West Company 



Preface 

THE aim of this book is to suggest 
a possible reconciliation between the 
scientific dictum, Thought is a func- 
tion of the brain, and the religious tenet, 
The soul of man is immortal. 

It is written in the hope that, by sug- 
gesting a new reading of Nature's script- 
ure, it may comfort those who have thus 
far found therein no promise of a future 
reunion with their beloved. The promise 
is surely there. Rightly read, the great 
scripture declares the immortality of the 
soul to be one of Nature's fundamental 
laws, a corollary from her great " law of 
substance." 



The First Letter 



"For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle 
were dissolved, we have a building of God, a house not made 
with hands, eternal in the heavens." 



Beside the New-Made 
Grave 



i 

Hillton, June 22, 1905. 
My dear Friend, — 

DO not write because I hope that any 
word of mine can give you comfort. 
There is no comfort for such grief as 
yours. But in my own times of need I have 
never failed to find a certain help in the af- 
fectionate expressions of sympathy that have 
come to me from old friends ; and so I write 
to give you the most earnest assurance of my 



io Beside the New-Made Grave 

love and sympathy and to proffer whatever 
service it may be in my power to render. 

Your son was the most beautiful and the 
most promising young man I ever knew. 
That seems a great deal for me to say, who 
know and have known so many young men. 
But I have weighed my words. Of them all 
he was the most beautiful in character, the 
most promising in every way. There was no 
thought in him that was not pure and noble, 
no impulse that was not generous and good. 
He was fitted to do high work for the world, 
and, had he lived, high work would have been 
given him to do. 

Had he lived, I said. He does live. 
Nature does not so mislead us. In him she 
gave us most abundant promise and her 
testimonies are very sure. With every year 
of my life the conviction deepens in my mind 
that the change we call death is not the 
annihilation of man's individuality, but merely 
its transference to new conditions. More- 



Beside the New-Made Grave n 

over, I see good reason to believe that the 
gate of the grave does not terminate, but 
only interrupts, those relations of affection 
which make the happiness of our life on 
earth. 

Possibly, by and by, it may be a solace to 
you to discuss with me these questions of 
life, death, and immortality, upon which, for 
many years, my work has naturally caused 
my thoughts to dwell. If in that way or in 
any other I can be of service to you, you 
have only to command me. 

Yours with most affectionate sympathy, 

A H 



The Second Letter 



" Rachel weeping for her children, and refusing t& be com- 
forted, because they are not." 



2 



New York, July i, 1905. 



'OUR tender words of appreciation of 



my dear son's character are inexpress- 



ibly comforting to me ; the more so, 
that in your assurance of his continuing life 
I find permission to cherish a hope which, 
until I read your letter, I had supposed my- 
self bound to repress. I was under the im- 
pression that science had pronounced thought 
a mere function of the brain, and had thus 
ruled out of court the immortality theory. 
But the fact that you believe in the theory 
assures me that whatever may be the attitude 
of science towards it, it is not an attitude of 
positive denial. 

I have never given much time to specula- 




1 6 Beside the New-Made Grave 

tion upon the mysteries that lie beyond the 
grave ; not, I hope, from any failure on my 
part to recognize their deep significance, but 
because I have been so immersed in practical 
affairs as to have had no leisure for matters 
which in their nature seemed rather of spec- 
ulative and future than of practical and pres- 
ent interest. But my son's death has given 
a new direction to my thoughts ; these prob- 
lems of death and immortality have now 
become to me of the most vitally practical 
and present interest. Therefore I cannot 
sufficiently thank you for your invitation to 
bring them to you for discussion. I shall 
esteem it a very great privilege to receive 
from you that instruction which only a nat- 
uralist is competent to give. 

For it is quite clear to my mind that such 
matters belong wholly in the domain of nat- 
ural science. I cannot be satisfied with the 
faith that satisfied my mother and my father. 
I cannot accept a theory, in itself improbable, 



Beside the New-Made Grave 17 

unless it is supported by that kind of evidence 
which we demand for the establishment of 
improbable statements in general. The im- 
mortality theory is to my mind quite improb- 
able, quite at variance with natural law, and 
I have never yet heard any evidence in its 
favor calculated to overcome the presumption 
against it. 

But your letter has roused in my mind a 
new hope. Perhaps it is my ignorance of 
natural science that is responsible for my 
mental attitude. Strong evidence might well 
seem weak to one unable to comprehend it. 
Surely you, who have spent a long life in the 
study and teaching of natural science, ought 
to know whether or not there is any good 
scientific ground for faith in a future life, i 
am going therefore to prove my gratitude for 
your generous offer by immediately availing 
myself of it. I wish you would tell me what 
the attitude of science toward the immortality 
theory really is, and give me also an outline 



1 8 Beside the New-Made Grave 

of the evidence upon which you base your 
own belief. I need not say how earnestly I 
desire to be convinced. I long for my son 
with a longing that is well-nigh intolerable. 
If there is any hope, I pray you let me have 
it. I know I am asking much of one whose 
time is precious, but your own kindness and 
my need must be my excuse. 

Ever yours truly, 

J W B 



The Third Letter 



" Old things are passed away ; behold, all things are 
become new" 



3 

Hillton, July 7, 1905. 

DO not be afraid of trespassing upon my 
time. I have large leisure in these my 
latter years, and there can be no better 
or more delightful way in which to employ it 
than in just such discussions as this that you 
propose. 

But do not ask me to get into the compass 
of one letter the evidence upon which I base 
my belief in immortality. Old people, you 
know, are prolix, — inclined to wander off 
into by-paths when they set out to tell a 
story. So let me tell mine in my own slow, 
discursive fashion, no matter how long it 
may take me. It will do you good to 
jog along with me through Nature's quiet 



22 Beside the New-Made Grave 

paths ; she never hurries, and we will take 
her pace. 

But I can tell in one letter all I know of 
the attitude of science toward the theory of 
immortality, w T hich, by the way, I think you 
are quite right in relegating to her domain. 
With all that relates to the order of Nature 
science has to do ; if the soul be immortal its 
immortality is a part of that order, and it is 
for science to show its place therein. To my 
mind the attitude of one who refuses to in- 
dulge a hope contrary to the affirmations of 
science is a far more religious attitude than 
that of one who neither knows nor cares how 
science bears on his faith. For Nature — 
and Nature includes man — is the expression 
of God, the One Eternal Energy. To pursue 
science therefore is to seek after God ; to 
question Nature is to inquire his will ; to 
abide by her revelations is to be obedient to 
his will. 

Science is the strongest bulwark of the 



Beside the New -Made Grave 23 

fundamental postulate of religion, viz. : There 
is One Eternal Energy, by whom and through 
whom and to whom are all things. This 
proposition, the greatest truth ever conceived 
by the mind of man, she has, so far as may 
be, empirically demonstrated. In the middle 
third of the last century, the inexplicable 
Time Spirit roused in the minds of several 
scientific men in England and Germany sug- 
gestions which led up, by way of experiment 
and inference, to the law that the universe is 
the expression of One Energy, the same yes- 
terday, to-day, and forever, eternally change- 
less, though infinitely diverse in form. This 
discovery, the immortal triumph of science, 
is simply the verification of religion's first 
postulate, and is the basis of science as 
it is the basis of religion. There is one 
energy, of which all the frame of things is 
but an expression, declares science. The 
One Energy of the Universe is God, the 
Lord Almighty, declares religion. Thus the 



24 Beside tlie New-Made Grave 

grandest discovery of science is seen to be 
one with the grandest announcement of relig- 
ion ; and more and more, as science grows 
and creeds broaden, will men come to learn 
that in Nature lurks not the destruction but 
the confirmation of religious faith. 

The second great postulate of religion, the 
immortality of the human soul, science has 
not yet succeeded in establishing on an em- 
pirical basis, and hence cannot take account 
of as a fact. It is simply an unverified 
hypothesis. The hypothesis originated at a 
very early period in man's history ; as soon, 
probably, as he rose far enough above his 
brute progenitors to frame a conception of 
death. Finding life to be, on the whole, a 
good thing, he desired its continuance, and, 
impelled by this desire, he devised the notion 
that the death he had become aware of was 
not the end-all for the soul, but merely a 
transition process by which the individual 
entered upon a new life in some sort of invis- 



Beside the New-Made Grave 25 

ible world, after, in a fleshly form, he had 
ceased to live in this. That this hypothesis 
is in fact consonant with the actual order of 
Nature, man has always had the strongest 
"will to believe,"* and for it he has sought 
confirmation from many and strange sources ; 
but never from the source where alone it 
could be found, — the observed ways of 
Nature. Indeed, until the discovery of the 
law of the conservation of energy, a scientific 
basis for the hypothesis was not possible. 
Since that great advance in our knowledge, 
the theory has begun to lose the nai'veness 
which characterized it in earlier times. Cult- 
ured men no longer dream of celestial cities, 
gold-paved and pearly-gated. All such crude- 
nesses have been relegated to the limbo of 
happy hunting - grounds and mead - flowing 
Valhallas, and the theory of immortality has 
been reduced to its lowest terms, viz. : There 
is a life beyond this life. Now the problem 

* Professor William James : The Will to Believe. 



26 Beside the New-Made Grave 

is to show how that proposition may be re- 
lated to the unified sum of our knowledge. 
In other words, there is need of a subsidiary 
hypothesis which shall enable us to incorpo- 
rate the immortality theory into the body of 
our science, as Darwin's hypothesis of natural 
selection, for instance, enabled us to incorpo- 
rate the Lamarckian theory of organic evo- 
lution. 

Science waits for this hypothesis ; for an 
interpretation of Nature's scripture which 
shall show how the immortality of the soul 
fits in with what we know of the great 
scheme of things. Meanwhile her attitude 
is an attitude of suspended judgment ; she 
waits for evidence. This attitude, however, 
is not without its individual exceptions. 
There is a considerable number of natural- 
ists whose minds are already made up one 
way or the other ; men who accept the doc- 
trine of immortality as simply and reverently 
as did the mothers at whose knees they 



Beside the New- Made Grave 27 

learned it; men who reject it as unqualifiedly 
as they reject the horned and tailed devil, or 
any other of the crude conceptions of the 
child-man. But the uplift in the world's 
thought which marked the scientific advance 
of the middle of the last century has so 
ennobled all thinking that whether men 
affirm or deny they do it in a large way. 
Denial has no longer the ring of scorn which 
degraded it in the eighteenth century and the 
first half of the nineteenth. That paltry 
scorn has become a lofty courage, a noble 
hope, worthy of men whose lives are spent in 
converse with Nature. The individual must 
pass, indeed ; but the life he has lived, if 
lived to high ends, will make for the great- 
ness of the race, and by his death as by his 
life he will have contributed to the service 
of man. Nor is affirmance longer a mere 
"ecstasy of faith." It is a joyful conviction 
that the evidence of Nature, so far as it has 
been deciphered, does go to show that when 



28 Beside the New-Made Grave 

man's earthly house of this tabernacle is 
dissolved, a building of God, eternal in the 
heavens, awaits him. 

I see no reason why the phenomenon we 
call death should continue indefinitely to 
baffle human research. It is not one of the 
manifestations of cosmic energy which lie 
above and beyond human experience. On 
the contrary it comes into every man's ex- 
perience and is always close at hand ; is 
something therefore which he is bound to 
strive to bring into relation with the rest of 
his knowledge of Nature. Thus far his in- 
quiries have too much ignored the physical 
side of the process. He has chosen to 
approach it altogether from the metaphysical 
side. But for man, at his present stage of 
evolution, there is no thoroughfare in that 
direction. He has got to explore psychic 
processes by means of their physical relations. 
When he begins to do so, Nature will be 
quick to answer his questions, and evidence 



Beside the New-Made Grave 29 



one way or the other will not be long want- 
ing. I am very firmly of the opinion that 
the evidence, when it appears, will be found 
to be strongly corroborative of the immor- 
tality hypothesis. Meanwhile, in the absence 
of evidence, you may believe or disbelieve 
without setting at naught any dictum of sci- 
ence. She neither requires you to reject 
the hypothesis nor encourages you to ac- 
cept it. 

Perhaps the best way for us to begin our 
discussion is for you to define clearly to your- 
self and to me the grounds on which you are 
inclined to discredit the idea of a future life. 
That will give us a starting-point from which 
to begin our pleasant wanderings through the 
wide reaches of our theme. My guidance 
will be indeed inadequate, by reason of my 
limited powers, but Nature herself gladly 
teaches the disciple who comes to her with 
a simple heart. I wish you could come up 
here among the hills for a few weeks. You 



30 Beside the New-Made Grave 

could not help gaining light and inspiration 
from Nature, living thus face to face with her. 
Upon these quiet heights, day unto day ut- 
tereth speech and night unto night showeth 
knowledge. Can you not come up? 



The Fourth Letter 



"Is the law then against the promises of God?" 



4 

New York, July 12, 1905. 
CANNOT get away from the city this 
summer. It is impossible. I regret it 
the less because of the keen pleasure 
afforded me by your letter, and by your 
promise of others in further discussion of the 
subjects which since my son's death have 
been uppermost in my thoughts. 

I hardly know how to begin the task you 
have set me, of defining the grounds which 
incline me to discredit the immortality hy- 
pothesis. I have never put them into shape. 
But has not science reached the conclusion 
that thought is a function of the brain, and 
is not the conclusion a virtual denial of the 
hypothesis ? I do not see how the functions 



34 Beside the New-Made Grave 

of an organ can survive the destruction of 
the organ. And that thought is a mere func- 
tion of the brain seems to me to be proved 
by the facts of every-day observation. Nobody 
doubts that a man's power to think depends 
on the integrity of his brain. I remember to 
have witnessed once an experiment in which 
the cerebral hemispheres were removed from 
a pigeon with the result that, though the 
pigeon still lived, it lived bereft of such intel- 
ligence as it before had possessed. I do not 
recollect what lesson the professor drew from 
his experiment, but its bearing upon the ques- 
tion of immortality seems to me pretty plain. 
I recall also a striking instance in the same 
line which came under my observation a few 
years ago. A youth, gentle, kind-hearted, 
and docile, received a severe injury to the 
head from the kick of a horse. After a long 
illness he recovered his bodily health, but he 
arose from his sick-bed a veritable fiend, — a 
prey to all vicious impulses, and absolutely 



Beside the New-Made Grave 35 

uncontrollable. It certainly seems to have 
been the brain that made the man in this 
case. I might — any one might — cite scores 
of instances pointing in the same direction. 
From such facts I can see but one inference, 
viz. : that a man's moral and intellectual pos- 
sibilities depend wholly upon the structure 
and texture of his brain, and that, therefore, 
with the death of the brain, his existence as 
a moral and intellectual being must cease. 

But I am very ignorant of both physiology 
and psychology. When I understand the 
evidence upon which your own belief in a 
future life is based, the matter will very 
likely appear to me in a new light. You are 
wise to go slowly, for you will have a good 
deal to do in the way of preparing the ground. 
I shall be well content to jog along with you 
at your own pace and in your own direction. 
The ways in which you lead me cannot fail 
to be ways of pleasantness, and I have no 
desire to shorten them. 



The Fifth Letter 



"Even the mystery which hath been hid from ages and 
from generations." 



Hillton, July 1 8, 1905. 
AM exceedingly sorry you cannot escape 
from that brick-and-mortar pandemonium 
of yours into this calm sanctuary of field 
and wood, where the tranquil earth rejoices 
continually in the beauty of her being, and 
one has time to realize how good life is. The 
sorrowing heart needs more than others the 
warm bosom of "the great, calm Mother." 
Men are not sane in cities ; they fret and 
strive and despair. However, we will not 
quarrel with the inevitable. Since you must 
stay in the city, we will try to make even that 
turmoil peaceful by peaceful thoughts. 

I think the truth of the proposition, 
Thought is a function of the brain, is quite 



40 Beside the New-Made Grave 

generally admitted in the scientific world, 
but not exactly in the sense in which it was 
understood by the school of materialists with 
whom it originated. They meant by it pretty 
much what we mean when we say, Digestion 
is a function of the stomach. But, in that 
sense, I do not think it can be regarded as a 
dictum of science. The relation of thought 
to the brain is not yet sufficiently understood 
to justify us in formulating any such dogmatic 
pronunciamento. In fact, we know nothing 
whatever about it. All we know is that when 
certain molecular changes take place in the 
cortical cells of the brain, they are accom- 
panied by the phenomena of thought ; but 
what the relation is between the nerve-thrill 
and the thought nobody knows. There are 
several theories on the subject, each of which 
has a tolerable following ; but most scientific 
men are content to wait till the researches 
of physiologists and psychologists shall have 
arrived at something definite. 



Beside the New-Made Grave 41 

In order that I may give you an idea of 
these theories, so far as I myself understand 
them, I must ask you to notice what happens 
while you are reading what is here written. 
As your eye travels along the page, first one 
word or word-group is focal in your conscious- 
ness, then another and another, each of these 
successive foci being the dominant element 
of a state of consciousness, which lasts but a 
flash and is gone, to give place to its suc- 
cessor. Not that these states of conscious- 
ness succeed each other like a series of 
electric sparks ; they glide on smoothly and 
continuously, for the reason that the dom- 
inant element of each is only a part of its 
content. The word on which your attention 
is at any instant focused is by no means all 
of which you are at that instant aware : the 
word to come and the word past, your own 
localized self, the various horrors about you — 
rumbling of wheels, shouting of hucksters, 
shrieking of engines, jangling of bells, — all 



42 Beside the New-Made Grave 

these are a part of the content of each suc- 
cessive state of your consciousness, and it is 
these which join together the successive foci, 
so that the sequence slips smoothly along 
without a break. This continuous sequence 
of states of consciousness is your soul. We 
are accustomed to speak of it as if it were a 
definite entity, localized in a definite place, 
from which it might or might not escape. 
It escapes continually. It slips, it slides, it 
flows, it cannot stay a moment. It is nothing 
but a constant stream of change. An in- 
stant's pause would be unconsciousness. It 
has been likened to an onward-flowing wave, 
the dominant element being the wave-crest, 
the accompanying sub-dominant elements the 
wave-body.* The crests rise and fall, the 
wave sweeps on — whither ? 

Now, if no trace remained of all this stream 
of consciousness, you would not be to-day the 
man of yesterday, of the last hour, of the 

* Professor William James. 



Beside the New-Made Grave 43 

last minute ; you would have no conscious 
personal identity at all. But the trace does 
remain. The wave of consciousness never 
flows on alone. The psychical wave has its 
twin, a physical wave which flows on with it. 
As your eye travels down the page, and word 
after word impresses itself upon your retina, 
the stimulus of sense impressions is followed 
not only by a succession of states of con- 
sciousness, but by a succession of molecular 
changes passing on from cell to cell in certain 
centers of your brain. Every part of the 
wave of consciousness has its concomitant 
in a corresponding part of the wave of nerv- 
ous activity, and the two waves seem to flow 
on together in perfect parallelism. It is 
by this physical sequence that the possibil- 
ity of a conscious continuance of personal iden- 
tity is secured. The sequence of molecular 
changes does not pass and leave no sign as 
does the sequence of states of consciousness. 
The cortical substance is modified by it in 



44 Beside the New-Made Grave 

such a way that under appropriate stimuli the 
train of thought accompanying any particular 
physical sequence can be revived. This con- 
stitutes memory, the essential to continuity 
of conscious identity. 

So far we may be said to know. Science 
has reached this point by inference from 
observation and experiment. But here our 
knowledge ends and our speculation begins. 
What is the relation between the twin waves, 
the wave of thought and the wave of nervous 
activity ? A relation of cause and effect, 
reply the materialists. The wave of nervous 
activity is, they assert, the cause of the 
thought-wave, as the action of the stomach 
is the cause of the flow of gastric juice. But 
this answer is not, I think, satisfactory to a 
majority even of those scientists who have 
reached a conclusion. 

Of the other answers that have been sug- 
gested, two are widely accepted. As we see 
in imagination the twin sequences flashing 



Beside the New-Made Grave 45 

along, every unit in the one having constantly 
its fellow in the other, the mutual relations 
never varying, the sequences always retain- 
ing their parallelism, it is natural to infer 
the existence of a single something moving 
onward, of which these two imaginary flash- 
ing lines may be regarded as the two sides ; 
just as, if we saw two points of light moving 
in the distance in parallel directions, and con- 
stantly preserving their parallelism through 
many, perhaps rapid and marked, changes in 
direction, we should infer that some one thing 
was moving along, lighted at both ends. And 
a large body of naturalists do thus infer with 
reference to the facts of consciousness. They 
regard the sequence of transformations of 
energy in the brain-cells, and its twin, the 
sequence of states of consciousness, as two 
aspects of one entity, the relation between 
them being analogous to the relation be- 
tween the two poles of a magnet, neither 
being cause, neither effect. This is my own 



46 Beside the New-Made Grave 

view, and though, looked at out of its rela- 
tions, it seems to negative the idea of im- 
mortality, yet seen in its relations, as we 
must always try to view the processes of 
Nature, it is, I think, wholly compatible 
with it. 

The other theory, suggested by the great 
German physiologist, Wilhelm Wundt, denies 
that the unvarying concomitance of the 
thought-wave and the nerve-wave is neces- 
sarily due to a relation of oneness between 
them. Instead of one something revealing 
itself in these two parallel waves, Wundt's 
disciples prefer to see two somethings held 
in a constant mutual relation by some means 
unknown to us. They assert that although 
a state of nervous activity is always, in our 
experience, concomitant with a state of con- 
sciousness, yet this mere human experience 
of ours is not enough to justify the inference 
that the concomitance is essential to the 
existence of either. On the contrary, they 



Beside the New-Made Grave 47 

hold that the relation between the two is 
such that the physical wave may cease to 
exist without cutting short the existence of 
the psychical wave, which may continue to 
flow on by itself beyond the cessation of its 
physical parallel. 

Other interpretations of the facts of con- 
sciousness have been suggested, some ap- 
proved by naturalists of great eminence ; but 
they are all very transcendental, and, on the 
whole, I am inclined to regard things tran- 
scendental as rather out of the naturalist's 
line. At all events, they are beyond my com- 
prehension, and therefore it would be useless 
for me to try to bring them within the com- 
prehension of another. 

But you perceive that, as I said at the out- 
set, there is nothing yet known to science 
which precludes the idea of immortality. We 
may hold it or reject it and be sure of good 
scientific company. 

I cannot see to write more. The sun has 



48 Beside the New-Made Grave 



long since set and it is almost night, — quiet 
to the eye, quiet to the ear. There is no 
color in the familiar fields but the gray of 
twilight, no sound but a distant robin's good- 
night song. Peace be with you, my friend, 
peace in the hope of a beauty transcending 
even this. 



The Sixth Letter 



" We are but of yesterday, and know nothing, because our 
days upon earth are a shadow" 



6 



New York, July 23, 1905. 

BUT, my dear friend, I cannot see at all 
that " there is nothing yet known to 
science which precludes the idea of 
immortality." On the contrary, it seems to 
me to be precluded by everything you have 
cited as empirically known to science. Of 
the three interpretations of the facts of con- 
sciousness which you have outlined, only one, 
so far as I can see, affords any ground what- 
ever for immortality, and that one appears 
to have been lugged in for the purpose of 
bolstering up a faith in immortality pre- 
viously existing in the mind of its orig- 
inator. I cannot believe it would ever have 
occurred to any sane man without some such 



52 Beside the New-Made Gi'ave 

pointer. The other two are practically one so 
far as the possibility of immortality is con- 
cerned, and that one a flat negative of the 
idea. If the thought-sequence and the nerve- 
sequence are inseparable, what difference does 
it make whether one is the cause of the other 
or whether they are two aspects of one entity ? 
In either case, the thought-sequence, or soul, 
must die when the brain dies, and either 
interpretation falls in perfectly with those 
facts of common observation and experience 
which seem so plainly to refute the doctrine 
of immortality. 

But for your explicit avowal of belief in 
the doctrine, your letter would have quite 
swept away the hope which, since my son's 
death, I have found myself cherishing, that 
possibly my ignorance of natural science may 
be partly responsible for my attitude toward 
the question of a future life. 

But you have put me on my guard against 
looking at the facts of consciousness out of 



Beside the New-Made Grave 53 

their relation to other facts, and since I am 
quite ignorant of those other facts, I can only- 
wait for light. Of course, as you must be 
aware, your position is utterly incomprehensi- 
ble to me — a mere riddle. You admit sub- 
stantially that thought is a function of the 
brain, and yet declare the fact to be quite 
compatible with the doctrine of immortality. 
But I know you well enough to feel as- 
sured that you hold no opinion without some 
rational ground, and I wait with the utmost 
interest for the reading of your riddle. 



The Seventh Letter 



" The Spirit searcheih all things, yea, the deep things 
of God." 



7 



Hillton, July 29, 1905. 



ES, I have no doubt whatever that 



practically the soul — or mind, if you 



choose to call it so — is a function of 
the brain ; neither have I any doubt that the 
soul is immortal. On the surface, these 
two propositions appear, as you say, wholly 
irreconcilable, but they are not so in fact, as 
I will try to show. 

Perhaps the best course for us to follow in 
seeking this reconciliation is to consider the 
evidence for each proposition separately. In 
the process the way to the reconciliation may 
appear. The evidence for each is, to my 
mind, very strong, though for the first it is 
based on observation and experiment, while 




58 Beside the New-Made Grave 

for the second it is based on inference from 
certain facts, which inference, though fairly de- 
ducible from the facts, is not necessarily so. 

The evidence for the first proposition you 
yourself have so clearly stated that we need 
not go over it again. The common facts of 
observation and experience do, I think, fully 
justify the inference you draw; though many 
people, I must admit, would not agree with 
me. We will, therefore, take for granted, in 
our discussion, that thought is a function of 
the brain, at least so far as regards any con- 
ditions likely to enter our experience for 
countless eons of time. The first proposition 
being thus disposed of, we will go on to con- 
sider the evidence — or, more strictly speak- 
ing, the argument — for the second. 

First, the idea of an abrupt dissolution of 
that association between psychic and physical 
modes of energy which constitutes the think- 
ing individual is wholly out of harmony with 
the general character of Nature's processes 



Beside the New-Made Grave 59 

so far as they come under our observation. 
To postulate such a sudden disruption is, 
therefore, to hazard a very bold conjecture; 
bold whether we conceive it to be effected by 
the annihilation of the individual or by his 
instantaneous transference to a sphere of life 
where the One Energy expresses itself in 
ways inconceivably different from modes of 
expression known to us. Either conception 
predicates of Nature an altogether longer 
leap than she has ever given us a right to 
expect of her. The notion of the instantane- 
ous transformation of so exalted an organism 
as a thinking, loving, and aspiring man into 
a mere lump of inert matter is a notion that 
savors too much of the miraculous to be 
entertained by any but the most poetic im- 
agination. Nature, as I have said, does not 
work in that way. The evolutionary process 
has not led up to a change so stupendous, a 
change surpassing in wonder even the birth- 
transformation. Nor is it less out of accord 



60 Beside the New-Made Grave 

with the beautiful harmony of the natural 
order to assume that an organism no higher 
in the scale of life than man, an organism 
thinking, loving, aspiring wholly by means 
of the apparatus we call his brain, is to be 
in the twinkling of an eye transformed into 
a being wholly independent of such an 
apparatus, a purely psychic manifestation 
of energy. There may be cosmic worlds 
wherein energy expresses itself otherwise 
than through matter, but they can hardly 
border upon this of ours. Their life-level 
must be at least as far above our own as we 
above the protoplasmic slime, and to reach it, 
therefore, must take as long presumably as 
for protoplasmic slime-speck to grow to man. 
It could not be done in the twinkling of an 
eye. No, the plain inference from all we see 
of Nature's ways is that the transition from 
grade to grade of life is a very gradual thing. 
Hence, as to-day finds you and me not totally 
different from what we were yesterday, so 



Beside the New-Made Grave 61 

to-morrow will not find us totally different 
from what we are to-day, even though in 
the interval we should undergo the change 
called death. , We shall be neither lumps 
of soulless clay nor disembodied spirits. It 
is safe to assume that the association be- 
tween the soul and its twin sequence in the 
brain is an association for all time, however 
it may be in realms where time is not. The 
problem, therefore, of its final dissociation we 
may as well leave for later consideration, — 
a few eons hence, say, when a longer life- 
experience shall have brought us somewhat 
nearer the realm of spiritual realities. 

Again, the annihilation of lofty individual- 
ity would be tremendous cosmic waste, and 
waste is something we have no right to lay 
at Nature's door. Her apparent lack of 
economy, like her occasional apparent lack 
of continuity, is nothing but our real igno- 
rance of her processes. There surely is a 
patent irrationality in the idea that, after 



62 Beside the New -Made Grave 

evolving through patient, age-long labor a 
creature of such immense life-value as man, 
she proceeds then to use her precious prod- 
uct merely as stuff for the making of other 
evanescent individuals, to be in their turn 
thrown aside as rubbish. Nature is too good 
an economist for that. Ernst Haeckel says, 
" The best one can desire after a courageous 
life spent in doing good according to one's 
light is the eternal peace of the grave." 
That is, he wishes to die when he dies. But 
he cannot be spared. It is one thing to 
lose from the universe the individuality of a 
moneron; quite another to lose the individ- 
uality of Ernst Haeckel. One moneron will 
do, perhaps, as well as another; but Ernst 
Haeckel has reached a point where his indi- 
viduality has become a cosmic force indis- 
pensable to cosmic ends, and he must be con- 
tent to live on. The individual is a certain 
manifestation of Energy. What makes the 
individuality we cannot tell ; if we could, we 



Beside the New- Made Grave 63 

could tell what God, the One, is. The more 
complex and the finer the forms of Energy 
which meet in the individual, the higher and 
more intense the individuality. As that com- 
plexity and fineness increase, the resultant 
will gradually take on a perfection of indi- 
viduality, a height of being, such that the 
energies which meet therein could never do 
just the same kind or amount of work in 
any other combination ; the individuality of 
the individual has become a factor which can- 
not be left out. Hence the annihilation of 
the individual — of Wolfgang Goethe, say — 
is unthinkable. 

The argument advanced by John Fiske 
is also well worth considering. He is of 
opinion that to posit the annihilation of the 
individual at death is to posit something 
entirely out of harmony with the natural 
order. "All the analogies of Nature fairly 
shout against the assumption,' ' says he. 
He bases his argument on the fact that it 



64 Beside the New-Made Grave 

never seems to occur to the primitive man, 
nor to any other man except the trained 
doubter, that death means annihilation. This 
alleged universality of the belief in a future 
life is sometimes denied, and recent researches 
do seem to show that there are tribes which 
have no idea of an unseen world. But it will 
probably be found that these are tribes which 
have not yet risen far enough above the ape 
to conceive even the idea of death. As soon 
as men fully realize that they shall die, they 
begin to construct a scheme for a future life. 
Practically, therefore, the recognition of an 
unseen world is universal. This recognition 
Mr. Fiske explains as an inner adaptation to 
an outer reality. He argues, starting from 
Herbert Spencer's definition of life as " the 
continuous adjustment of internal relations 
to external relations," that, as the bodily 
organs have been developed in response to 
the body's environment, and the social in- 
stincts in response to the social environment, 



Beside the New-Made Grave 65 

so this development of an out-reaching toward 
continuance of soul-life must mean a corre- 
sponding spiritual environment to which the 
instinct is an adaptation. " Otherwise we 
have a relation in which the subjective term 
is real, and the objective term non-existent, 
which is something wholly without precedent 
in the whole history of creation." 

This is the main body of the argument in 
favor of the immortality of the human soul, 
or so much of that argument as has had 
any effect upon my own belief. For these 
reasons — partly too, perhaps, from simple 
faith, derived I know not whence — I long 
ago became as firmly convinced of the im- 
mortality of the soul as of the dependence of 
the soul upon the brain. It remained, then, 
to find means for reconciling these two ap- 
parently irreconcilable articles of belief, — to 
seek in Nature that confirmation of both 
which I was sure must lurk there. 

Your criticisms upon Wundt's theory imply 



66 Beside the New-Made Grave 

a certain disapproval of that procedure of 
mine ; as if one might not, as you say, look 
in Nature for means to bolster up his own 
faith. But he may construct an hypothesis 
affording rational grounds for his faith, and, 
having done so, he may try it upon Nature 
to see how it will fit. Nature offers no easy 
reading of her riddles. There she is, and in 
her is a grand harmony ; her "atoms march in 
tune," each so related to all, and all to each, 
that were one to lose the rhythm of the 
march no cosmos would be possible. But as 
to what the law of that order is she offers no 
clue. To find it man must fall back on his 
wits, as Copernicus did when he devised his 
system of the heavens, as Darwin did when 
he devised his scheme of natural selection. 
Once a solution of a world-riddle is offered, 
she will furnish to the patient seeker the 
means to test its validity, but she demands 
first his guess, his hypothesis. Man need 
look in her for nothing till he knows very 



Beside the New-Made Grave 67 

definitely what he wishes to find. Every 
so-called fact that goes to make up the sum 
of our knowledge existed first as an hypoth- 
esis in the mind of a thinking man ; in his 
"will to believe.'* He found it in Nature 
because he looked for it, and he would never 
have found it in any other way. 

Now, I have looked in Nature for confir- 
mation of my hypothesis, and I think I can 
show you that the confirmation is there, and 
that to find it you need credit no miracle nor 
disregard any accepted truth of science ; you 
need only watch Nature at her every-day 
work. Not that an hypothesis is necessarily 
worthless because it rests on a miracle. For 
what is there in our experience that is not a 
miracle ? Certainly not this universe of ours. 
On rational grounds its existence is an impos- 
sibility, yet here it is ; and in the presence 
of this great basic miracle, all other miracles 
so-called are commonplace. As Huxley said, 
" In such a universe as ours, anything might 



68 Beside the New-Made Grave 

happen." Still, miracles — other than the 
one ever present — make very unsatisfactory- 
supports for hypotheses, and therefore I am 
glad I can offer you a quite non-miraculous 
means of reconciling the immortality of the 
individual with the necessity of a physical 
basis for psychic life. The hypothesis may 
not commend itself to your mind ; what seems 
clear to me may not seem clear to you ; but 
it will be pleasant for us to wander together 
in Nature's large, pure spaces, even if we can- 
not both see the same aspects of truth. 

Lest perhaps you have not found time, in 
your busy life, to keep up with the record 
of the advance of science, I will in my next 
letter, by way of leading up to my demonstra- 
tion, set forth a few of the facts or generally 
accepted hypotheses of science which bear 
upon the subject of our inquiry. 



The Eighth Letter 



!t There is none that understandeth." 



8 



New York, August 2, 1905. 
'OUR proposition that the connection 



between soul and brain is something 



death does not sever shifts to an alto- 
gether new ground the difficulties in the way 
of my accepting the immortality theory. But 
I wait your further exposition. 

I am very glad you propose to throw a 
little light on the path we must tread, for I 
cannot easily overstate my ignorance of every- 
thing pertaining to natural science. In my 
school and college days I learned what little 
was in the ordinary curriculum, but even that 
little has now become extremely hazy, and 
for the most part, I suppose, obsolete as well. 
Occasionally I hear the chat of scientific men 




72 Beside the New-Made Grave 

or glance over a scientific article in a mag- 
azine, but practically I am completely igno- 
rant. Do not take for granted any knowl- 
edge whatever on my part, even the most 
elementary. 

I have been wondering whether by " the 
beautiful harmony of the natural order u 'you 
mean such harmony as exists in the marvelous 
adjustments of a perfect piece of mechanism. 
In that sense I too can see a harmony, but 
not otherwise. To me, in every other sense, 
the order of Nature seems a very cruel and 
unbeautiful order; so magnificently adjusted 
indeed as to quite shut out that notion of 
"a fortuitous concourse of atoms "of which 
I used to hear in my college days, but iron- 
cold, like any other machine. I find nothing 
in it to which the ethical nature of man can 
in any way respond. It is a scheme into 
which the annihilation of the human soul, 
with all its hope, its nobleness, its aspiration, 
fits perfectly. True, the bringing to naught 



Beside the New -Made Grave 73 

of so great a piece of work as man is cruel 
and wasteful beyond expression, but so is the 
plan revealed in the whole life history of our 
earth ; everywhere the strong preying upon 
the weak, everywhere evil bearing down good, 
everywhere wretchedness, pain, and wrong. 
True, the annihilation plan, in its wholesale 
and gratuitous cruelty and waste, negatives 
the idea of a Supreme Benevolence con- 
trolling Nature ; but so does the hideous 
slaughter of innocent, happy human beings, 
daily done to death in our society by acci- 
dent, crime, or war ; so does the dreadful 
cry coming down to us out of the past 
from cross and rack and wheel and fire; 
so does the evolutionary process in all its 
brutal details. 

However, I am very far from being satis- 
fied with my own attitude toward the govern- 
ment of the universe. It has long seemed 
to me strange that since there is so much 
love in man, there should seemingly be none 



74 Beside the New-Made Grave 

in that First Cause from which man springs. 
I am hopeful, therefore, that when your wis- 
dom shall have corrected my ignorance, I 
shall begin to discern the Eternal Love where 
now I see but iron law. 



The Ninth Letter 



" The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the 
everlasting arms." 



9 



Hillton, August 9, 1905. 
\ \F /HEN I was young and lived in cities, 
\A/ the world's cry of pain was so dread- 
ful in my ears, and its sufferance by 
any power capable of preventing it, so wholly 
inexplicable that I carefully kept myself from 
dwelling upon the possible existence of such 
a power, and sought to study Nature simply 
as she presented herself to my observation, 
eschewing all speculation upon what was 
plainly beyond the scope of a naturalist's 
research. And I have never of set purpose 
altered my method. Nevertheless, it was not 
many years before I found growing within 
rne that sense of the perfection of the nat- 
ural order as the expression of a Supreme 



78 Beside the New- Made Grave 

Benevolence at the heart of the universe, 
which has been the mainstay of my life. Yet 
the mystery of evil is as much a mystery 
to me as ever. I cannot clear up your 
doubts. I cannot demonstrate the compat- 
ibility of a human will to set up a Spanish 
Inquisition with a divine will to do all things 
well. I cannot demonstrate the compat- 
ibility of the universal cry that shudders up 
out of Nature's breast with an all -perfect 
and all-beautiful natural order. Yet, strange 
to say, I believe in such a will, in such 
an order. You smile. But it is not alto- 
gether the poetic vein in me that finds reason 
for my faith. We know so little, we can 
see so little, and the cosmos is so vast ! 
Surely it is not reasonable for us to pass 
judgment on a whole of which we see so 
almost infinitely little. 

I think you are somewhat inclined, like 
most of us, to look less at the general prev- 
alence of good in Nature than at the local 



Beside the New-Made Grave 79 

absence of good. Yet on the whole, not- 
withstanding the apparent hardships of the 
natural order, there is in it far more of the 
beautiful than of the unbeautiful, far more of 
good than of evil. Why, then, from certain 
local phenomena which we call the phenom- 
ena of evil, should we deduce the non-exist- 
ence of an Absolute Goodness, any more than 
from certain local phenomena which we call 
the phenomena of darkness, the non-existence 
of the sun ? The sun shines on though night 
broods upon the earth, and God loves on 
though sorrow shadows life. We cannot in- 
deed understand the infinite complex of the 
eternal order, yet we can see, perhaps, that in 
itself order is good. A universe wherein from 
the frequent benevolent interference of an 
over-ruling power the sequence of cause and 
effect was quite lost sight of, might be a 
better universe than ours, but the chances 
are the other way. In an orderly universe 
we know what to expect of the elemental 



80 Beside the New-Made Grave 

forces ; we can predict the behavior, under 
all circumstances, of fire and water and air, of 
gravity and heat and electricity ; in a general 
way, we can foretell the modes of activity 
of the psychic and physical energies in tiger 
and snake, in ape and savage. And this 
knowledge of ours implies the possibility of 
an ameliorating universe, wherein gradually 
intelligence shall come to dominate the non- 
intelligent. But a universe wherein through the 
kindly intervention of Providence there was no 
keeping track of the sequence of cause and ef- 
fect, would not be a universe adapted to the evo- 
lution of higher from lower, not a universe of 
such infinite possibilities as ours, though there 
might conceivably be in it less of pain.* 

The highest truth man has yet deduced 
from his experience is this : the cosmos is 
an expression of the One Energy. This we 
have a right to believe, however materialistic 
may be our ways of thinking. We have a 

* Dr. A. W. Jackson : Deafness and Cheerfulness. 



Beside the New-Made Grave 8 1 

right to believe all phenomena to be but 
modes of that One Energy, all realities, 
physical or psychical, but revelations of that 
Infinite One. But evil is not among the 
things that are. It is negative. It is merely 
absence of good. Love is, truth is, goodness 
is. But what is hatred ? what is falsehood ? 
what is wrong ? Negations all ; not modes 
of the One Energy, because only realities 
can be modes of reality. It is in the things 
that are — in beauty, in love, in wisdom — 
that we look for indications of God ; not in 
deformity and wrath and wrong. God is the 
sum of all, as he is the* source of all, and 
therefore each least thing that really is is 
indicative, so far as it goes, of the great 
whole of which it is a part. By and by, in 
worlds to come, as we go on in life, we shall 
see grander indications and rise to an ever 
more and more adequate conception of the 
Eternal One. Now we are young and weak, 
and this one truth is all we can grasp : that 



82 Beside the New-Made Grave 

whatever intimations of absolute goodness 
are suggested in us by the good we see 
in earthly creatures, whatever suggestions of 
beauty are awakened in us by the beauty 
we behold in our environment, those intima- 
tions, those suggestions are glimpses caught 
by our child-eyes of the Absolute Goodness, 
the Absolute Beauty of that Being which 
only the whole cosmos can adequately ex- 
press. I cannot prove that blessed Presence. 
I cannot reconcile it with the woe of the 
world. But what am I that I should ? I 
trust. 

This prelude to the promised subject-matter 
of my letter has so lengthened itself out — 
pardon my prolixity — that I think I will 
stop here, and send you this as it stands, by 
way of answer to your doubts and queries, 
and to-morrow morning we will begin our 
brief survey of cosmological science. 



The Tenth Letter 



" Of old hast thou laid the foundations of the earth : and 
the heavens are the work of thy hands. They shall perish, 
but thou shall endure : yea, all of them shall wax old like 
a garment ; as a vesture shall thou change them, and they 
shall be changed : but thou art the same, and thy years 
shall have no end?'' 



IO 



HlLLTON, AugUSt IO, I905. 

T is true the cosmos of to-day's science is 
a very different thing from the universe 
of your college days, the early sixties. 
Some of the things that go without saying 
now were hotly contested then. The law of 
the conservation of energy had not fairly 
leavened the world's thought, the spectro- 
scope and the camera had not yet told the 
secrets of the stars, the evolution theory was 
anathema in many quarters and imperfectly 
understood everywhere, and it would not be 
far wrong to say the whole structure of bio- 
logical science was yet to build. 

The enormous broadening, during the last 



86 Beside the New-Made Grave 

half century, of the scientific conception of 
the cosmos is due largely to men's con- 
stantly growing perception of the infinite 
implications of the law of the conservation 
of energy. Physical science was born anew 
in those wonderfully simple experiments by 
which, in the forties, Joule demonstrated the 
transformability of mechanical energy into 
heat, and the subsequent experiments and 
generalizations which led up to the promulga- 
tion of the grand law : all forms of physical 
energy are inter-transformable and hence are 
One Energy, the same yesterday, to-day, and 
forever, changeless in totality and nature 
though diverse in form. 

The men were few who, so early as the 
sixties, realized the deeps into which the 
tremendous statement opened. Even yet 
we are hardly awake to its full import, but 
the workings of its sublime monism have 
gradually leavened the thought of our time 
until a tendency toward a monistc interpreta- 



Beside the New -Made Grave 87 

tion of all phenomena has come to be the 
most distinctive feature of our science. 

The experiments of Joule and his com- 
peers dealt only with physical forms of en- 
ergy, but the monistic impulse imparted by 
their discovery speedily outstripped the slow 
processes of experiment and led men into the 
contemplation of a grander cosmos than they 
had dreamed of ; a cosmos whose foundations 
were empirically revealed indeed in the work 
of the formulators of the law of the con- 
servation of energy, but whose mighty whole 
embraces realms psychic as well as realms 
physical, and thereby becomes a true expres- 
sion of the Infinite Energy which is its source. 
About this notion of energy expressing itself 
in infinite change, psychic and physical, the 
cosmos of modern science is built up. 

As to the Primal Existence and the genesis 
of things, those are mysteries with which 
science may not cope ; thought in those 
directions is merely speculation, and the 



88 Beside the New-Made Grave 

speculations of scientific men vary, like those 
of other men, according to the temperament 
of the individual. The primary conception 
of science is the conception of infinite sub- 
stance occupying all space and thrilling with 
a ceaseless motion which reveals the pres- 
ence of infinite energy. Some thinkers re- 
gard matter and energy as co-existent from 
all eternity. Of these, one school makes a 
distinction, not intelligible to me, between 
substance and matter, regarding energy and 
matter as attributes of substance. But to 
my mind the better philosophy is that form 
of monism which sees in energy the sole 
primal existence, that which was from the 
beginning and shall be forever, that from 
which matter with all its phenomena is but 
an evolution. Of this primal evolutionary 
process we have no least conception; but 
somehow the wondrous change is effected, 
somehow the One Energy translates itself 
into the one substance, and by its ceaseless 



Beside the New-Made Grave 89 

shiver the cosmic substance proclaims the 
presence of the Primal Life. This One 
Eternal, religion names the Living God. 

The ceaseless thrills or waves of motion in 
the cosmic substance we call physical forms 
of energy ; energies, that is, which reveal the 
Eternal Energy under the form of motions 
in matter. Though only a comparative few 
of these modes of motion enter our experi- 
ence, they are infinite in number and variety. 
Yet this infinite diversity our science has 
revealed as infinite oneness, since in their 
timing a subtle harmony exists such that 
without jar or friction one can merge into 
another, can, as it were, lose itself in that 
other. Psychic forms of energy are revela- 
tions of the One Energy otherwise than as 
motions in matter, though, so far as our ex- 
perience goes, they are inseparably associated 
with those motions. What the nature of the 
association may be we do not know, since we 
do not know how the One Energy translates 



go Beside the New-Made Grave 

itself into the one substance. Ignorant of 
this basal cosmic process, we fail to connect 
the psychic forms of energy with that great 
circuit of physical energies revealed to us by 
the discoverers of the law of conservation of 
energy. But in the Eternal Mind the con- 
nection is made. Our finiteness knows only 
how the heat of the forge is one with the 
flash of the lightning, the glory of the sun- 
light, the thunder of the cataract ; but the 
Eternal knoweth how it is one with the white 
grace of the lily and the sturdy strength of 
the oak, one with the joy of leaping and sing- 
ing things, one with the thought, the love, the 
rectitude, the aspiration of man. 

To the mysterious association of physical 
and psychic energies constituting between 
ourselves and our environment the relation of 
perceiver and perceived is due all our knowl- 
edge both of ourselves and of our environment. 
All that our human speech can name, all that 
our human consciousness affirms, is simply 



Beside the New-Made Grave 91 

this relation of perceiver and perceived ; for 
all we know is motion, and that by which we 
know is motion. But we cannot represent 
in thought a world thus constituted. The 
human mind has not yet reached a stage 
of development adequate to a realization of 
truths which nevertheless it can formulate 
in words. If we should succeed in bringing 
clearly before our minds even such a concep- 
tion of these mysteries as may attend the 
verbal formulae by which science tries to 
represent them, we should walk as in a 
dream, our world would be a phantasmago- 
ria. Therefore we need not try. One thing 
at least we know, and that is that whatever 
we may be, and whatever our environment 
may be, and whatever the relation of the two 
may be, at least we are to ourselves very 
solid realities, standing in a very thinkable 
relation to a very real environment. Nature 
does not juggle with us. The existence — 
to us — of her everlasting hills may be due 



92 Beside the New -Made Grave 

to certain marvelous adjustments on her 
part ; none the less, the hills stand firm in 
the perfection of those adjustments, and we 
need not trouble ourselves with mysteries 
beyond our grasp. We may as well take 
our world to be simply what it appears. 

The red rose, for instance, looking in at 
my window : now, I know that rose is only 
an aggregate of variously moving molecules, 
visible to me, another aggregate of variously 
moving molecules, in virtue of certain cor- 
respondences between its molecular motions 
and the molecular motions of my sight or- 
gans, and recognized by me as a rose and 
as beautiful in virtue of certain other cor- 
respondences with molecular motions in the 
association centers of my brain. But to me 
it is nothing of the sort ; to me it has no 
motion except as the wind sways it ; it is 
simply a red rose, and as such I rejoice in 
its beauty and am thankful to the embracing 
Nature which has given it birth. I look out 



Beside the New-Made Grave 93 

from my window upon the quiet country-side 
wherein God gives me in these my latter 
years to dwell. I know it is just a bit of a 
swiftly moving sphere, which, whirling on 
itself, rushes forward along the tremendous 
curve of its path about the sun, and with the 
sun about a vaster sun, and so on into a 
complex of motion in whose mazes the imag- 
ination loses itself. But I am content not 
to realize this unrest, this speeding through 
abysmal space. I am content to behold noth- 
ing but the calm of perfect peace. The early 
morning flushes all my fields with a golden 
glory prophetic of the sunlit hush that shall 
brood upon them at noonday, and the tran- 
quil shadows that shall make beautiful the 
eventide. Looking upon them, the beauti- 
ful words of the psalmist, sweet with old- 
time associations, rise in my memory, bringing 
their familiar blessing : "He maketh me to lie 
down in green pastures, he leadeth me beside 
the still waters!' The stillness may be only 



94 Beside the New-Made Grave 

a relative stillness, but to me it is real. I 
think I am at rest, therefore I am. 

We will talk of our material universe, then, 
as if it were what it appears, since what it 
is is not thinkable. As Herbert Spencer said 
years ago, " all speculations respecting the con- 
stitution of matter commit us to unthinkable 
conclusions." 

The prevailing theory as to that constitu- 
tion is still the theory of atoms, which you 
were taught in your school days. It will do 
as well as another, though others have been 
suggested, because the chief use of any such 
theory is to bring within reach of our thought 
and speech things which in themselves are 
unthinkable and unspeakable. Also it ap- 
pears more consonant with so much of the 
system of things as is open to our knowledge, 
in that it recognizes that principle of indi- 
viduality to which Nature seems constantly 
striving to give expression. The atom is one 
as the Cosmic Energy is one. No finest 



Beside the New-Made Grave 95 



chemistry of ours has ever fused two atoms. 
Like the human soul, each has yearnings 
towards its fellows ; like the human soul, 
each, its yearning forever unsatisfied, goes 
on its solitary way and does its cosmic task. 
When two or more atoms draw so closely 
together that the body formed by their pro- 
pinquity is in a manner stable, they make a 
molecule, and from the union of molecules 
are built up in like manner the crystal and 
the sphere. 

Science has become strongly of the opin- 
ion, however, that the old idea of the indi- 
visibility of the material atom can only be 
true so far as the resources of our chemistry 
are concerned. Doubtless " no man ever 
split an atom," and perhaps no man ever 
will, — a true atom, at least. But it does 
not follow that Nature cannot and does not 
accomplish the feat. The ultimate atom of 
our matter can be nothing more than an 
aggregate of atoms of some finer kind of 



96 Beside the New-Made Grave 

matter. This conception consists far better 
with what we know of Nature's ways than 
does the old conception of the atom as an 
ultimate. Nature knows nothing of ulti- 
mates. Still, at every seeming barrier, with 
infinite, gentle invitation, smiles the beyond. 

From the atoms, whatever cosmic processes 
may have gone to their making, have been 
and are being evolved the nebulous masses 
of our universe, and from these, in turn, our 
multitudinous spheres. These we conceive 
of as grouped into systems, moving in mighty 
orbits through space, and made one whole 
by means of a tenuous substance, through 
which waves of influence are transmitted 
from sphere to sphere determining the order 
of the spheric march. These waves of influ- 
ence you will recognize as modes of motion 
in the cosmic substance, and this tenuous 
medium, from which all cosmic structures 
have been evolved, as the cosmic substance 
itself. 



Beside the New-Made Grave 97 

It is into the deeps of this substance that 
the gaze of science is to-day most eagerly and 
intently directed. We call it the ether. It 
is the embosoming substance in which our 
suns and systems are borne as in a sea. It 
pervades all the spaces of our universe, inter- 
stellar, inter-molecular, inter-atomic, forming 
within every material body a finer body, in- 
visible but no less real than the one our 
eyes behold. In this ethereal space -filler 
lies hidden, we believe, the solution of many 
of the problems which now baffle our com- 
prehension. Its existence in Nature was 
discovered because a good guesser looked 
there for it in order to account for the phe- 
nomena of light, and for years it was regarded 
merely as a convenient means for light trans- 
mission. Now, science sees in it a means 
of transmission for all the physical forms of 
energy and a realm of unimaginable possibil- 
ities. In one way its existence is still hy- 
pothetical, since it in no way manifests itself 



98 Beside the New-Made Grave 

to our senses however aided ; in another way 
it has ceased to be hypothetical, in that we 
have harnessed it to our machines and made 
it serve our needs in various ways. 

The rhythmic vibrations of the cosmic sub- 
stance, of which the vibrations of our atoms 
may be regarded as typical, are revealed 
everywhere throughout the cosmos, so far as 
we know the cosmos. Everywhere, even in 
the solar systems, we see or conceive this 
universal rhythm of change. All about us 
are solar systems coming into being, as ours 
came millions of years ago ; systems yielding 
up to cosmic transformation their stores of 
energy, as ours is yielding hers ; systems 
already become, as will ours, inert and cold ; 
and systems crashing, as in the fullness of 
time will ours, into tremendous ruin, gen- 
erator of that fierce passion of transforming 
energies out of which shall spring a new birth 
wherein the great rhythm shall begin anew. 

The first glimpse of the law of evolution — 



Beside the New-Made Grave 99 

the complement of the law of the conserva- 
tion of energy — was discerned by Immanuel 
Kant about the middle of the eighteenth 
century. He perceived that the solar sys- 
tems of our universe had been evolved from 
primal matter by the slow aggregation of 
atoms, first into nebulae, then into spheres ; 
and his theory, mathematically established by 
the great French astronomer Laplace, is still 
the most widely accepted method of account- 
ing for the inception and building up of our 
universe. About fifty years later, the second 
intimation of the law was revealed to the 
mind of the French naturalist, Jean Lamarck. 
He discerned the working of the evolutionary 
process in the multiplicity of organic species, 
but failed to discover the steps in the process. 
In the thirties of the century just closed, the 
English geologist, Sir Charles Lyell, carried on 
Laplace's story of the evolution of suns and 
planets by showing how one of those planets 
had built itself up from an incandescent, 

Lore. 



100 Beside the New-Made Grave 

rotating mass into a fit abode for living 
things. But it was not until after the dis- 
covery of the law of the conservation of en- 
ergy that the great law of evolution, in its 
completeness, dawned upon the elect mind. 
In a monumental series of treatises, the pub- 
lication of which was begun about the middle 
of the last century, Herbert Spencer welded 
into a great philosophic system those frag- 
ments of the cosmic process which his pred- 
ecessors had discerned, and revealed to man 
the basic truth that all Nature is a continual 
becoming ; that the cosmos, through all its 
realms, is a constant cyclic evolution of 
higher forms from lower. In its influence 
upon scientific thought, this discovery has 
been second only to the discovery of the 
conservation of energy. A little later, in 
1859, Charles Darwin filled the gap in 
Lamarck's discovery by showing how the 
law had worked in the development of or- 
ganic species, and thus transferred the whole 



Beside the New-Made Grave ioi 

subject to a new plane. Men now found the 
evolution theory to be invested with a per- 
sonal interest, and thus what had been a 
matter appealing chiefly to the learned be- 
came the absorbing question of the day. 

Darwin's work did for biology what the 
discovery of the law of the conservation of 
energy had done for physics. More, even ; 
for before Darwin the sciences of zoology 
and botany had been mere gropings after 
a classification impossible without the key. 
Darwin supplied the key in his hypothesis of 
natural selection working on variations some- 
how arising, and the splendid modern devel- 
opment of the science of biology is the 
result. He showed a practical way by which 
Nature could have accomplished the immense 
amount of work involved in the developing of 
the great number of organic species upon our 
earth from one or a few primary stocks, and 
also made it reasonably clear that she had in 
fact done so. 



102 Beside the New-Made Grave 

This wonderful achievement of Darwin's 
instantly flashed into the minds of men the 
perception of oneness in Nature, from atom 
of matter to majesty of man, thus supple- 
menting the discovery of the persistence of 
energy. The perception came with a shock, 
so at variance was it with the quaint Hebrew 
traditions which had somehow got entangled 
with men's understanding of that kingdom 
of God which Jesus preached, and had thus, 
oddly enough, come to constitute a seemingly 
organic part of the Christian religion. You 
remember the clamor of those early years, 
" the thunder of the captains and the shout- 
ing." It has mostly died into silence now. 
The master had done his work so well, had 
spent so many years in satisfying himself of 
the truth he taught, had accumulated such a 
store of observed facts, had recognized and 
disposed in advance of so many apparent 
objections, had, in short, made the whole 
matter so absolutely self-evident, that there 



Beside the New-Made Grave 103 

was no escape from his conclusions. In his 
first book, as you doubtless remember, he 
made only a passing allusion to the obvious 
application of his theory to the descent 
of man, but the inference from his facts 
was irresistible. The truth was so plain 
that he might read who ran, and the world 
read it. 

Less than fifty years have passed since 
the publication of The Origin of Species, and 
already we are, for the most part, well con- 
tent to believe that man is nothing but an 
evolution from brute progenitors, his wonder- 
working brain only a development from prim- 
itive neuroplasm in some poor, despised sea- 
creatures of the primordial period. Only a 
development, I said. It was a poor thing to 
say. I know of nothing which so clearly 
proves the wisdom we see in each other to 
be one with the Universal Energy, as the 
wonderful process of Nature which, out of 
protoplasmic slime, has evolved the thinking 



104 Beside the New-Made Grave 

man ; nothing which manifests with such 
unclouded splendor the omnipotence of the 
Living God, as this life-story of humanity. 

The work of Darwin and Lamarck did not 
touch the problem of the origin of the pro- 
toplasmic compound and the first darting of 
the life energy through it. Our life remains 
a mystery. But it is only one of many, and 
perhaps we lay overmuch stress upon our 
ignorance in this particular ; such stress, in- 
deed, as seems to imply a knowledge on our 
part of the origin of every form of energy 
but this. Really, we know nothing whatever 
of the relation between the One Energy and 
its expression, the one substance. For in- 
stance, we have no idea why the energy of 
magnetism should invariably manifest itself 
in connection with the substance we call 
lodestone, nor why certain substances are 
better conductors of electricity than certain 
other substances. We know only the fact. 
In the same way we see that when Nature 



Beside the New-Made Grave 105 

has produced a certain carbon - compound, 
peculiar in the great number of atoms to its 
molecule and in its great molecular instabil- 
ity, this compound becomes capable of man- 
ifesting a form of energy differing by an 
apparent gulf from other forms. This differ- 
ence consists in or results from a capacity, 
on the part of individuals evolved from pro- 
toplasmic matter, of effecting, by means of 
molecular changes, a response, as it were, to 
their environment, in virtue of which they 
become capable of registering experience, and 
are hence rendered educable. This peculiar 
form of energy we call life. Why it should 
never manifest itself save in connection with 
protoplasm we do not know. In this, as in 
all other matters that concern the relations 
of matter and energy, we must rest content 
with the fact. 

Attempts have been made more than once 
during the last fifty years to produce an article 
of protoplasm as good as Nature's, but they 



106 Beside the New-Made Grave 

have failed. They always will fail. No chemist, 
however ingenious, will ever succeed in pro- 
ducing a substance that will stand the proto- 
plasmic test : the power to thrill with the 
breath of life. There are some things 
Nature alone can do ; this is one. Probably 
the conditions that made it possible for her 
to produce her wonderful compound exist no 
more upon earth, but they certainly existed 
once, for there is life now and time was when 
there was none. The evolution of the living 
from the non-living must therefore have been 
somewhere effected in Nature's laboratory ; 
though, perhaps, I ought to make this state- 
ment rather as an expression of my own opin- 
ion than as an unquestioned fact. It is a 
point on which scientific men disagree. 

The evolution of the organic unit, the 
primary cell, having been once achieved, the 
new capacity of response to environment, of 
educability, brought about slowly and grad- 
ually the evolution of individuals possessing 



Beside the New-Made Grave 107 

the capacity in ever higher and higher degree, 
until at length the microscopic cell became the 
man who told its story. This work was accom- 
plished by various agencies, but mainly, as 
Darwin taught and as a majority of natural- 
ists believe, through the selection by Nature 
of individual variations, arising we know not 
how. Just as the horticulturist, by a process 
of skillful selection, produces in a compar- 
atively short time, from a single faintly-col- 
ored flower, a gorgeous thing of many-petaled 
beauty, or the farmer, from a fortunate varia- 
tion, a new and valuable breed of cattle, 
so Nature, working unintermittingly through 
millions of years, has, from a lowly primary 
stock, brought forth upon the earth the 
myriad tribes of living things, with thinking 
man, their king. 

The very lowest of our ancestral forms we 
know nothing about. But probably some- 
where near the beginning of the line appeared 
a one-celled creature resembling the amoeba 



108 Beside the New-Made Grave 

of our own seas and lakes. The amoeba is a 
creature so low in the scale of life that, 
though it feeds and grows and moves and 
reproduces its kind, it yet has no specialized 
organs. Its whole soft body flows over 
its food, contracts into a round ball when 
touched, moves itself by a sort of flowing- 
out of its shapeless mass here and there into 
foot-like processes, and reproduces itself by 
simply splitting in two. All this we used to 
do ages ago in primordial seas when we were 
one-celled creatures like amoebae. But no 
two of us were exactly alike, more than two 
plants are, or two babies, and at length a 
variation occurred, favorable to progress, 
under conditions which enabled natural se- 
lection to act upon it. At once Nature 
seized the chance, and after a time, a long, 
long time, succeeded in producing something 
higher than an amoeba, something like a 
sponge perhaps, or a coral, with body con- 
sisting not of one cell but of many. Plainly 



Beside the New-Made Grave 109 

the evolution of this many-celled but still 
homogeneous creature was the initial step 
to a creature cell-specialized, heterogeneous, 
fitted for a physiological division of the labor 
of life. Accordingly, ere long, this higher 
creature appeared, and in time took on a form 
showing the first faint beginnings of separate 
nerve-tissue. This accomplishment being full 
of promise, Nature kept unceasingly at work 
upon it till at length she had evolved a worm- 
like thing, in which the neuroplasmic cells 
were in a manner centralized. And now 
these worms, these far -back ancestors of 
ours, having in their centralized nerve-system 
found the path leading to manhood, straight- 
way began to " mount through all the spires 
of form." They developed a spinal cord and 
a brain, a backbone and a skull ; became fish- 
like and breathed through gills, frog-like and 
breathed through lungs ; left their watery 
home and, in a new environment, learned to 
give suck to their young, thereby originating 



no Beside the New-Made Grave 

the evolution of sustained maternal love, the 
basis of the higher life.* Thus equipped for 
nobler destiny, they went forth against the 
foul reptilian brood which darkened the earth, 
and after long battle overcame it and entered 
into its heritage ; then, in this better world 
that they had made, they mounted upward 
still and upward, till finally, achieving ape- 
hood, they thought, they loved, they were 
ready to be men. 

So far as regards bodily structure, the 
man-shape was practically reached when ape- 
hood was achieved, but the development along 
psychic lines has since been so enormous 
that, though the structural difference between 
the highest ape and the highest man is com- 
paratively slight, the psychic difference be- 
tween the two is myriad-fold greater than the 
psychic difference between the ape and the 
amoeba, notwithstanding the fact that the 
lapse of time from ape to Shakespeare is 

* John Fiske : Through Nature to God. 



Beside the New-Made Grave ill 

less, probably, by millions of years than that 
from amoeba to ape. 

Somewhere in the middle tertiary an ape 
developed who varied from his kindred in the 
possession of certain brain-centers whereby, 
in a crude, imperfect fashion, he was able to 
effect an association of the various ideas pre- 
sented to his consciousness, into definite trains 
of thought. At this point he began to cast 
off apehood, but he was yet far enough 
from manhood. Still a very apelike creature, 
he climbed about in his arboreal home, and 
by grunt and squeak and chatter communi- 
cated his thoughts to his fellows. Ever 
better and better he and his fellows under- 
stood one another, till at length the fateful 
moment came, — he spoke, and then and 
there the ape became a man. Crude and 
imperfect enough his speech, low and poor 
enough his type of manhood, but it was 
speech and it was the speech of man. No- 
body believes that man is descended from 



112 Beside the New-Made Grave 

any of the extant apes, only that man and 
the extant anthropoid apes had, ages ago, a 
common ancestor. 

One of the testimonies which Nature bears 
to the truth of this theory of the descent 
of man is found in the fact that the em- 
bryonic development of the human being is 
a recapitulation in brief of the successive 
stages leading from unicellular creature to 
man. Not, of course, that the process can 
be traced in every minute particular ; all 
the changes of millions of years cannot be 
crowded into a few months. But the record, 
although, like the story of the rocks, more 
or less blotted and obscured, is yet, like that 
story, so plain that there is no mistaking it. 
I see not how any sane man, reading the 
record, can deny the patent fact that man 
originated in lowly one-celled organisms which 
lived upon our earth while yet the waters 
covered it, and that he has developed along 
the same lines by which all other mammals 



Beside the New-Made Grave 113 

have reached their mammalian estate ; sur- 
passing them simply because his line had in 
it greater possibilities than theirs, — surpass- 
ing them, as I believe, because thereby was 
worked out the all-wise purpose of the Eter- 
nal Energy. 

The lines of evolution within our knowl- 
edge, whether organic or inorganic, are lines 
of type evolution. Of the evolution of the 
individual, except during one transient period 
of not more than eighty or ninety years' 
duration, we know nothing, since the knowl- 
edge would imply a more extended life- 
experience than our earth can afford. Even 
upon our earth, however, we can trace one 
line of individual evolution which, though it 
may not bear directly on the Christian doc- 
trine of immortality, is yet not without value 
as a means for better comprehending the 
man of to-day. Let us think back for a 
moment along the life-track of any individual, 
— say King Edward Seventh. In 1841 



H4 Beside the New-Made Grave 

King Edward was a tiny bit of protoplasm 
lying in the protecting matrix of a being, of 
whose body that bit of protoplasm was a con- 
stituent, living part. The cell had indeed 
been modified, to the extent of half its sub- 
stance and potentiality, by fusion with another 
cell, but it was nevertheless a constituent 
part of the parent that nourished it. That 
parent having been likewise a constituent 
part of her parent, that parent of hers, and 
so on backward through the life-track to 
some one-celled creature of primeval seas, it 
follows that the body of that one -celled 
creature is, in a certain sense, present in the 
body of Edward Seventh to-day. Never has 
there been an instant when the individual 
which originated in that primordial lump of 
protoplasm has ceased to live, although, since 
the introduction of the dual system of repro- 
duction, it has again and again sunk, in the 
germ, to infiinitesimal proportions. This as- 
sertion of identity between the individual 



Beside the New-Made Grave 115 

creature of immemorial ages back and the 
individual man of to-day seems like specula- 
tion, so wonderful is it ; but if you reflect a 
moment you will see that it is only a plain 
statement of a fact, — a fact which, well- 
weighed, will greatly aid the student of social 
science in the interpretation of human nature 
and human action. 

Whether or not our own solar system is the 
only one upon which life and thought exist, 
we, of course, have no present means of ascer- 
taining. It is indeed regarded as improbable 
that any of our sister planets are adapted to 
the support of life ; but however that may be, 
the immense number of solar systems in our 
universe renders it quite incredible that, among 
them all, only one, and that one not in any per- 
ceivable respect extraordinary, should be the 
seat of life. Common sense would seem to 
teach us otherwise. 

I think I have told you now all you need 
to know in order to understand how the 



Ii6 Beside the New-Made Grave 

theory of the immortality of the soul fits into 
the scheme of things. You will notice that 
the view I have given of the cosmos is, for 
the most part, speculative ; but so, in large 
degree, is all our so-called knowledge. The 
present domain of science is infinitely little 
compared with the immensity beyond. That 
beyond is open to research and conjecture. 
Year by year new hypotheses will be devised 
and empirical means for testing them en- 
larged. But to-day the cosmos of science 
is, in the main, a conjectured cosmos. Still 
we walk in mystery almost as complete as 
that which closed about the primeval man, 
and still, like him, we seek to read the riddle 
of the universe. But we may have faith to 
believe our guesses to be nearer the mark 
than his, because of the centuries that lie 
between, centuries wherein has shone unfail- 
ingly the light that shone for him, the light 
that shineth more and more unto the perfect 
day. 



Beside the New-Made Grave 117 

I have written pages enough to amount to 
a treatise rather than a letter, but I will give 
you time to digest it before I write again. 
Much of it you very likely knew to begin 
with, despite your own conviction of igno- 
rance, so the work of digestion may not be 
so very large a task. 



The Eleventh Letter 



" Lo, he goeth by me, and I see him not. y 



1 1 

New York, August 14, 1905. 
'HESE are large, calm thoughts on 



which you feed me. I can understand 



why it is that about the few great 
scientific men whom I have met there has 
always seemed to be a certain atmosphere of 
serenity, like the serenity of sunny hills in 
autumn. There is indeed no room for fret- 
ting cares or personal anxieties in minds 
habitually occupied with large, impersonal 
thoughts. Life becomes to such no feverish 
strife for petty ends, but a calm participation 
in the mighty works of God ; death no dread- 
ful catastrophe, but a mere incident in the 
great progression of Nature. 

I have begun to realize the absurdity of 




122 Beside the New-Made Grave 

conditioning my acceptance of the immor- 
tality theory on my ability to understand its 
physical possibility ; as if, forsooth, nothing 
could be reasonable that transcends the 
capacity of my own poor reason. The words 
I used to hear so often in the old times from 
my mother's lips come home to me with a 
new significance, — " With God all things are 
possible." In my self-sufficiency I have been 
inclined to set them down as the mere phras- 
ing of a beautiful fancy, but now I have come 
to comprehend in them a cosmic truth ; the 
same truth which Huxley's aphorism ex- 
presses, though not so adequately, because 
less loftily : " In such a universe as ours any- 
thing may happen." But while I no longer 
condition my acceptance of the theory on 
physical demonstration, I am eager, never- 
theless, for the demonstration. 

I fear, however, that my habits of thought 
and the necessity I am under, in my business, 
of weighing evidence and getting very clearly 



Beside the New-Made Grave 123 

in my mind the sequence of things, puts me 
at a special disadvantage in the attempt to 
conceive such a world of motion as you have 
outlined. Since it is the creed of science it 
would be presumption in me to scoff at it, 
yet my utter inability to frame any concep- 
tion whatever, answering to the verbal state- 
ment, induces in me a feeling of unreality at 
the heart of things. We are indeed such 
stuff as dreams are made of, and our little 
life, if it be not rounded with a sleep, goes 
on from dream to dream. Doubtless this 
sense of unreality springs from the narrow- 
ness of my knowledge. When I see some- 
what further into the depths of which you 
have given me a glimpse, perhaps a broader 
philosophy will give me back the sense of 
solidity and permanence in my surround- 
ings. 



The Twelfth Letter 



; ' In my Fathers house are many mansions" 



I 2 

HlLLTON, AugUSt 21, I905. 

IN my last letter I set down nothing as 
truth, upon which scientific men are not 
substantially agreed. To-day I am go- 
ing to portray for you a cosmos mainly 
speculative, yet based for the most part on 
the speculations of distinguished men of sci- 
ence, and consistent, I think, both with the 
greatest truths of science and with faith in 
eternal life. My purpose compels me to this, 
because, obviously, before I can show warrant 
in Nature for the theory of immortality, I 
must demonstrate the possibility of a scheme 
of things into which the theory will fit. It 
will not fit into a scheme which admits of lim- 
itations. In such a scheme, indeed, it would 



128 Beside the New-Made Grave 

be easy to find place for the annihilation of 
Nature's noblest achievement, but not in a 
cosmos consistent with the law of the con- 
servation of energy and the law of evolution. 
The cosmos of the current thought, the 
cosmos necessarily conceived by any mind 
accepting the annihilation theory, is not 
consistent with those laws. It is a cosmos 
defined everywhere by limits ; it consists 
of a mere finite host of spheres, which has 
been and is being built up out of deter- 
minate, indivisible atoms by the interaction of 
certain forms of energy transformable among 
themselves but constituting a closed circuit, 
and which floats in an infinite sea of other- 
wise undifferentiated substance conceived as 
the ultimate form of matter. Evidently this 
neatly finished affair cannot be the true 
cosmos ; it is not an adequate expression 
of the One Infinite Mind ; it expresses 
nothing more than the limitations of ingen- 
ious little man. Man seeks ultimates ; he 



Beside the New-Made Grave 129 

is too conscious of his finiteness to be 
quite comfortable among infinites ; appalled 
by the awful cosmic deeps about him, he 
hastens to fence them out with mete and 
bound of indivisible atom and ultimate form 
of matter, finite system of stars and closed 
circuit of energies, and pleases himself with 
the fancy that his little enclosure is the whole 
cosmos. But it will not do. The infinite 
breaks in ; it will not abide by his fences. 
One after one his ultimates flow away before 
his eyes and leave him face to face with 
the gleaming deeps of illimitable mystery. 
Nature will brook no bar to her eternal un- 
folding, no Thus far and no farther. All her 
paths are paths into the infinite and thus run 
on forever. If any apparent barrier seems 
to check the progress of thought into the 
unknown, the barrier is due not to any lim- 
itation in Nature but to the limitations of 
human thought. It is a cloudy phantom of 
man's imagining. 



130 Beside the New-Made Grave 

For example, the ultimateness of the ether. 
Now, that notion has no sanction in the anal- 
ogies of Nature. Nature knows nothing of 
ultimates ; certainly not of ultimates so close 
to little man that he can grasp them in his 
thought and turn them to account in the 
heaping up of dollars. Once, we set our 
ultimate closer yet, — at our own form of 
matter. But Nature showed us that we had 
mistaken her way ; that she had a whole 
world of matter within and beyond our own. 
Straightway, we set up that ethereal world 
for our new ultimate, and would none of a 
beyond. But to no purpose ; the beyond 
beckons and the path runs on. Every dis- 
covery we make in Nature is only an indica- 
tion of more of the kind farther on. The 
existence within our world of a world more 
tenuous than ours implies the existence 
within that of another more tenuous still, 
and, within that, another and another, on 
and on in endless evolution, the atom of 



Beside the New-Made Grave 131 

one tenuity being ever the gateway to the 
next, a multiplex compound of finer atoms. 
Thus what we call the ether is, in reality, an 
infinite reach of successive tenuities of sub- 
stance. In each tenuity all spaces are occu- 
pied by the substance of the worlds beyond, 
there being therefore no such thing as action 
at a distance, since there is no unoccupied 
space, the succession of tenuities being in- 
finite, or, rather, being one of the phases 
of that mysterious union between the One 
Energy and the one substance, which is 
beyond finite comprehension. 

In the light of this conception, you will 
notice, the permanent atom loses its perma- 
nence and falls into harmony with the cosmic 
progression ; and as, in one direction, our 
minds move on, through sphere and system 
and ever greatening universe, into the realm 
of the infinitely great, so in the other, through 
crystal and molecule and ever lessening atom, 
they move on into the realm of the infinitely 



132 Beside the New -Made Grave 

little. No beginning, no end, follow what 
indication of Nature we may. 

Thus, too, with the finite number of the 
stars. Finite indeed it is, according to the 
latest conclusions of our astronomy, but only 
finite in that it is the one term present to us 
of an infinite series of starry hosts, pulsing 
continually out of eternity on to eternity, the 
individual systems dropping away, but the 
line running on forever toward an absolutely 
perfect type. The number of stars to-day 
may be finite, and so to-morrow and to- 
morrow, but the sequence of these finites 
is infinite. 

And the closed circuit of physical energies. 
Here indeed we seem to have arrived at a 
substantial barrier, looming vast across our 
way. But no, it is a phantom like the others. 
The finite, unable to approach the knowledge 
of the supreme law by which the One Energy 
translates itself into the one substance, can- 
not comprehend how psychic energies con- 



Beside the New-Made Grave 133 

nect with the energies of matter in the great 
circuit of evolution from the infinite into the 
infinite. But connect they must and do. 
The closed circuit of physical energies can 
be nothing more than one of the " still as- 
cending and expanding gyres " of a spiral so 
vast we miss the curve, sweeping on from 
universe to universe with nowhere break or 
bar. For all things eternally become. The 
ways of Nature, the ways of the spirit, are 
ways of ceaseless evolution. No rest, no 
completion, no closed circuits. Still from 
eternity to eternity, out from God, on to God, 
sweeps the grand spiral of that mighty march 
in which all things finite join, which only the 
Infinite can comprehend. What we call our 
knowledge is only the glimpses we have 
caught into the mysteries of this eternal 
movement. Every extension of our knowl- 
edge can be only some new insight into the 
relations of seen phenomena to this mysteri- 
ous and inconceivable reality, this ceaseless 



134 Beside the New-Made Grave 

progression of the finite out of and into the 
infinite. 

Clearly, then, it is in no limited cosmos 
that we are to seek warrant for our faith in 
immortality. The cosmos with which we 
have to do is an infinite cosmos, the expres- 
sion of an Infinite Energy. Its substance 
occupies all space, in ceaseless evolution 
from, in ceaseless progression towards, that 
Energy whose living presence it proclaims in 
ceaseless thrills of motion, — motion through 
whose infinite variety of modes a compelling 
law prevails, in obedience to which they dis- 
pose themselves in a sublime and beautiful 
order, an infinite array of harmonious aggre- 
gates. Or, to state the conception other- 
wise, — availing ourselves of those aids by 
which science makes thinkable these " un- 
thinkable conclusions," — let us say that 
among the diverse motions with which the 
atoms of the cosmic substance are endowed, 
certain likenesses may exist as to rate, or 



Beside the New-Made Grave 135 

kind, or some such matter, whereby attract- 
ive forces are set up among atoms having 
like vibrations, in virtue of which such atoms 
tend to draw together from all space, thus 
differentiating the eternal substance into in- 
dividualities or worlds, each world the totality 
of such cosmic atoms as have among their 
various motions one common mode of vibra- 
tion. Of these worlds our own material 
universe is one. For the suggestion of the 
presence in Nature of these attractive, world- 
building forces, we are indebted to some ex- 
periments of the Russian physicist Bjerknes 
with bodies vibrating at the same musical 
pitch. He finds that such bodies are mu- 
tually attractive ; and this establishment of 
the possibility of attraction by means of 
synchronous vibrations gives us a right to 
look for such attractions among the cosmic 
atoms.* 

This seems a simple enough way of ac- 

* Professor Shaler : The Individual, 



136 Beside the New-Made Grave 

counting for the breaking up of the cosmic 
substance into individual worlds, — worlds 
which, owing to our limited experience, we 
can conceive of only as differing tenuities 
of matter. The resistless mutual attraction 
of synchronous vibration which draws like- 
moving atoms together is thus seen to be the 
world-force for each tenuity of matter. In our 
own tenuity we call it gravitation ; and just as 
we see — or conceive — gravitation acting to 
build up and sustain our universe of matter, so 
we may conceive like cosmic forces acting to 
build up and sustain an infinite number of such 
universes. Thus the cosmos presents itself to 
our imagination as an ordered host of worlds 
or tenuities of matter, worlds finer than ours, 
worlds grosser than ours, arranged perhaps 
in ever evolving series, refining and refining 
continually as they move on toward the In- 
finite Energy from which matter is somehow 
an evolution. 

It is only with some such cosmos as this, 



Beside the New- Made Grave 137 

some cosmos wholly without limitation, that 
the law of immortality can consist. To such 
a cosmos the implications of the law of the 
conservation of energy point, it is in harmony 
with the law of evolution, and the new theory 
of gravitation fits it. Nature further corrob- 
orates the hypothesis by the abounding full- 
ness of her beauty. She abhors a dreary 
vacuity of space. Age after age have her 
heavens been telling the glory of God and 
her firmament showing his handiwork. But 
no dull infinite of undifferentiated matter 
could ever tell God's glory, nor could the 
finite spheres of one poor universe body forth 
his infinite perfection. Nowhere in Nature 
do we find warrant for so poor a conception. 
Our own fair earth repels it, as with swift- 
changing splendors she makes way upon her 
bosom for the march of days and nights. As 
she glows with beauty before the face of sun 
and stars, so glows the cosmos in the light 
of the Living God. Nowhere a monotonous 



138 Beside the New-Made Grave 

vacuity of space, but everywhere a mighty 
host of trooping worlds ; nowhere pale glim- 
merings of scattered suns, but everywhere 
golden splendors of perfect light ; nowhere 
black abysms of darkness and cold, but every- 
where the serene depths of that peace which 
passeth understanding, the blessed presence 
of Eternal Love. 

There is no practical difficulty in the way 
of the existence of many unseen cosmic 
worlds if we bear in mind the fact that 
though our limited resources of thought and 
speech compel us to think and speak of them 
as varying tenuities of matter, yet they are in 
reality only varying harmonies of motion in 
the space-filling substance. It is true that 
behind all our knowing stands the fact that 
our knowing is itself an unthinkable thing; 
that it somehow depends on that mysterious 
relation of perceiver and perceived which 
is one of the cosmic problems whose solu- 
tion seems to be beyond human compre- 



Beside the New-Made Grave 139 

hension. It is true that we actually know 
nothing about the real existence of our own 
universe. But whatever the relations may be 
which bring our universe to our conscious- 
ness, they cannot be peculiar to our little 
sphere. They must be cosmic relations, and 
therefore capable of bringing all possible 
worlds to the consciousness of intelligences 
native to them. Just as our universe exists, 
be that way as it may, so may other universes 
exist. 

Of life in these many worlds I have as yet 
said nothing. But a cosmos consistent with 
the law of immortality must wear, as its 
perfecting crown, the immortal jewel of life, 
self-conscious life. That mysterious associa- 
tion of psychic and physical forms of energy 
which, in our experience, reveals itself in the 
mind of man, is a cosmic association, and in 
worlds of a rarer tenuity of matter becomes, 
we must believe, a continually finer adjust- 
ment. Conscious being must take on ever 



140 Beside the New-Made Grave 

higher and higher forms as through world 
after world it mounts into the mystery of 
that Infinite Being which is the source, the 
sum, the end of life. 

And may I dare, at length, to lead your 
thought upward to that Being, the Original 
and Immanent Energy toward whom all 
Nature and all spirit perpetually yearn ? It 
was into the knowledge of that Being, the 
All-Creator and All-Sustainer, that the great 
seers of the last century opened the way, 
when, with patient toil, they made plain the 
tremendous truth that through eternal trans- 
formation the One Energy of the cosmos 
eternally persists, — the same yesterday, to- 
day, and forever, the Eternal One. Spheres 
and systems and universe are but its chang- 
ing form. God, the One, is the sole existence. 
Now, in our low estate, we know him only as 
he reveals himself in the ordered motions of 
matter, and throughout countless ages we 
may never know him otherwise. But we seek 



Beside the New-Made Grave 141 

the One, we have no rest but in the One. 
Therefore we follow the grand law on into 
realms where matter has no place, realms 
beyond space and time. Therefore, O God 
Eternal, our faith looks up to thee, and by 
our faith we know that beyond the far 
tenuities of matter, — thy fleeting form, — 
the spirit shall return unto God who gave it, 
and God shall be all in all. For the Living 
God is an individual — is the individualized, 
the personal totality of all that is. He is 
the Absolute of that principle of individual- 
ity which man cannot define, but to express 
which is Nature's highest aim. And it 
is in virtue of his individuality that the 
ways of Nature and the ways of the spirit 
are his ways, the working out of his most 
perfect will. It is in virtue of his individual- 
ity that we call him Father and commune 
with him, aspiring from our mortal dust to 
the righteousness, the wisdom, the love, the 
inconceivable perfection that are absolute in 



142 Beside the New-Made Grave 

him. Thus it is in God that the cosmos com- 
pletes itself. He is the All, he is the One ; 
the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and 
the end. 

I know the cosmos of many worlds which 
I have sketched for you is very speculative, 
but so is every cosmic hypothesis, — cannot 
be otherwise. Yet do not fear that by launch- 
ing out with me upon this seeming sea of 
speculation you have got to break away from 
all scientific moorings and venture upon a 
quite untried course. By no means. The 
assumption of many material worlds is not 
new. More than a hundred years ago an 
English scientist, Dr. Thomas Young, ad- 
vanced the theory that an infinite number of 
unseen material worlds, of differing tenuities 
of matter, exists in space ; and some thirty 
years ago the theory was, in its main outlines, 
endorsed and brought into harmony with 
modern science by two of the most eminent 
physicists of our day, Balfour Stewart and 



Beside the New -Made Grave 143 



Peter Guthrie Tait. A. R. Wallace, co-dis- 
coverer of natural selection, says : " There 
probably are other universes, perhaps of other 
kind of matter, subject to other laws, perhaps 
like our conception of the ether/ ' And very 
likely many writers have expressed other 
phases of the same thought. So you see 
we are not venturing out of good scientific 
company in conceiving the cosmos to be an 
infinite reach of material worlds. Indeed, 
strange as it may seem, we are not com- 
pelled to part company with the theologians, 
for not a great while ago, Dr. Samuel D. 
McConnell set forth, in his Evolution of Im- 
mortality, very much the same doctrine. 

I think, if it commends itself to you, you 
will find in it a cure for the unhappy sense 
of unreality which your glance into cosmic 
abysses has brought. By suddenly realizing 
the fact that our material environment is 
other than we are in the habit of regarding 
it, you have lost, for a time, your mental 



144 Beside the New-Made Grave 

adjustment to it. But continued thought 
will bring a finer and more complete adjust- 
ment. You will perceive that everything is 
real in virtue of the reality of the One of 
whom everything is a manifestation. 

In my next letter I will show you, or try 
to show you, how, in this cosmos of many 
worlds, the law of immortality finds its place ; 
how it is possible for the soul to be at once 
immortal and dependent upon a physical 
basis. 



The Thirteenth Letter 



;< If a man die^ shall he live again ? 99 



*3 

New York, August 26, 1905. 

MOST readily can I accept your hypoth- 
esis of a cosmos of many worlds. 
Indeed I do not well see how I could 
accept any other. Life gains in dignity seen 
in such magnificent perspective. 

And yet in all this evolution of worlds and 
of life, is it not the perfecting of the type 
rather than of the individual which appears 
to be Nature's chief care ? Everywhere, it 
seems to me, the individual withers as the 
type is more and more. I perceive indeed 
that the idea of God, as the individualized or 
personal whole of cosmic energy, does some- 
how carry with it the suggestion of an infinite 
evolution of individuality as of the other 



148 Beside the New-Made Grave 

attributes of the One Being — thought, truth, 
love, beauty. But I cannot work out the 
suggestion. I cannot see in Nature, as you 
have taught me to read her testimonies, any 
way of realizing the conception implied in 
your idea of God, — the conception of the 
infinite continuance of those individuals which 
drop from the type-stem as it advances. You 
have shown me the many mansions. Now 
show me the pathway of the individual tend- 
ing, through mansion after mansion, toward 
the Eternal One, whose individuality the 
mansions reveal. Show me how, though a 
man be dead, he yet shall live again. 



The Fourteenth Letter 



" When this corruptible shall have put on incorncption, 
and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall 
be brought to pass the saying that is written. Death is swal- 
lowed up in victory. 0 death, where is thy sting? 0 grave, 
where is thy victory ? " 



14 

Hillton, September 5, 1905. 

YES, the individual passes indeed, but 
there is no such thing as death in all 
the kingdom of God. The stars in 
their courses do not chant the requiem of 
lowlier spheres, the bird does not sing from 
the tree-top the dirge of the humble lizard, 
nor does the majestic speech of man pro- 
claim the sacrifice of simpler generations 
upon the altar of his greatness. It is but 
a careless ear that hears in Nature dirge or 
requiem or sacrificial hymn. Still through the 
ceaseless flow of change all things express the 
One who changeth never, — the Eternal Indi- 
vidual. If the one attribute of the Primal 
Energy which the cosmic process most stren- 



152 Beside the New-Made Grave 

uously seeks to express be its individuality, 
is it credible that Nature does really work 
through such wholesale waste of the individ- 
ual as appears upon the surface ? credible 
that while, for the physical energies of the 
organic individual, and even for its mere 
substance, death means only change, yet for 
the individuality itself — that sublime mys- 
tery which makes of the totality of cosmic 
energy the Very Present God — it means 
utter, hopeless annihilation ? Is Nature's 
grandest result but a vapor, a breath, an 
evanescent thing ? The implications of the 
law of the conservation of energy point to 
no such pitiful conclusion, nor do the mighty 
promises of the law of evolution. It is 
true that as the type advances the units 
drop out of the line. But they do not 
drop into nothingness. They cannot. Nature 
makes no such leaps even to accomplish her 
ends ; certainly not then to accomplish no 
end. Each unit does duty, while need is, in 



Beside the New-Made Grave 153 

the type evolution of one world, then dies to 
that world in the act of adjusting itself to 
another, wherein again it helps to carry out 
the type-thought ; and thus on forever, cease- 
lessly working out its own destiny, while 
ceaselessly contributing to type -destiny in 
the worlds through which it passes. 

How this transition from world to world 
is effected without the loss to the individual 
of his conscious identity, how, in other words, 
the immortality of the soul is reconcilable with 
the necessity of a physical basis for soul-life, 
I am now to show, or try to show. 

What, in common speech is known as the 
next world, or the unseen world, must be 
that world of our series which, under the 
broad name, the ether, has become, to a cer- 
tain extent, known to our science. It is that 
tenuity of matter of whose atoms the so- 
called atoms of our matter are composed. 
It is not, therefore, so remote from us that 
we can frame absolutely no conjecture as to 



154 Beside the New-Made Grave 

its possible conditions; for no two adjacent 
terms in any evolutionary series can differ 
absolutely one from the other. It is true 
that, by her slow accumulation of slight dif- 
ferences, Nature does, "in her long leisures," 
bring about enormous changes, but these 
changes are never sudden. For example, 
in the line of terrestrial organic evolution, 
we find between the two terms, slime-speck 
and Shakspeare, a difference in life-value that 
is practically infinite, but between slime-speck 
and amoeba no such difference appears. So 
with the series of refining tenuities of matter : 
between any two widely sundered terms we 
may well conceive a difference comparable 
to the difference between slime -speck and 
Shakspeare, but between any two adjacent 
terms — as our world and the world beyond 
— the resemblance is likely to be tolerably 
close. What are Nature's phenomena in one 
world are presumably somewhat similar to her 
phenomena in the next, as golden-rod at one 



Beside the New-Made Grave 155 

point in a country road is presumptive evi- 
dence of golden-rod a half mile further on. 
Therefore I think we have a right to con- 
jecture that the world next our own, though 
far from a mere ethereal reproduction of our 
own, does yet, in some fashion, follow its gen- 
eral lines ; that its formative processes do so 
far correspond with those processes which 
have produced the great spheric individual- 
ities of our own universe that the ether 
pervading those individualities is not mere 
undifferentiated substance standing to them 
in a relation like that of the water included 
in a submerged lobster-trawl to the including 
trawl ; instead, it is individualized as the in- 
cluding material spheres are themselves in- 
dividualized; demarked from the universal 
ethereal substance as the spheres are them- 
selves demarked from the material sea which 
embosoms them, — that undifferentiated part 
of our own universe which our science does 
not yet distinguish from the ether. 



156 Beside the New-Made Grave 

This correspondence need not be exact, — 
is not, probably. It does not follow, for in- 
stance, that because the sphere is the form 
assumed by the great masses of our matter, 
therefore the great masses of the ethereal 
world are likewise spherical ; nor must I 
of necessity see, within that forest - clothed 
mountain-slope which bounds my view, just 
such another mountain, clothed with just such 
other forests. But I do see within that 
tranquil, earthly beauty, itself unspeakable, a 
serener beauty though I cannot guess its out- 
lines ; a beauty that eye hath not seen, nor 
ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart 
of man to conceive; a beauty whose roots 
lie deep in those mysterious sympathies which 
link together, into one cosmic whole, the 
myriad harmonies of motion in the eternal 
substance. 

The correspondences as to individualization 
which we have assumed to exist between the 
two tenuities in their non-living substance 



Beside the New-Made Grave 157 

must exist likewise in their living substance, 
and must here take on a form closer and 
deeper than any relation known to the inor- 
ganic. It is not impossible, indeed, that to 
some peculiar union between living bodies 
of our matter and potentially living bodies 
of finer matter indwelling within them, may 
be due those distinctive features of the pro- 
toplasmic compound which baffle our chem- 
ists and give to protoplasm its unique place 
in Nature as the only substance, known to 
terrestrial experience, fit to be the vehicle of 
life. Be that as it may, it is conceivable that 
the evolution of the living individual should 
mark the advent of a new possibility in Nat- 
ure, — the possibility of a union between the 
material body and its ethereal tenant, such 
that the two constitute not one body merely, 
but one living body, actually alive in its 
material part, potentially alive in its ethereal 
part. To state it otherwise : in the organic in- 
dividual the evolutionary process has achieved 



158 Beside the New-Made Grave 

an individual alive clear through, — through, 
that is to say, the whole series of bodies 
which we speak of as the ethereal body. 

Before we go any farther, let us stop a 
moment, and consider what we mean by the 
term alive. Life and death are terms for 
which we have no satisfactory definitions. 
Perhaps Herbert Spencer's is still as good as 
any : Life is the continuous adjustment of 
internal relations to external relations. It 
is a capacity in the individual of responding, 
by means of molecular changes, to his en- 
vironment. In the higher organic individ- 
uals, at least, it is that relation of perceiver 
and perceived which is due to a peculiar asso- 
ciation of psychic energy with certain forms 
of physical energy. Death, then, must be 
the failure of internal relations to adjust 
themselves to external relations ; a cessation 
of the individual's capacity of response to his 
environment; a readjustment of that associa- 
tion between physical and psychic forms of 



Beside the New- Made Grave 159 

energy upon which the relation of perceiver 
and perceived depends. When, therefore, I 
say the material organism is alive clear 
through, I mean that, though the material 
body is the only body which at the present 
moment actually responds to its environment, 
yet the latent capacity for such response 
inheres in each body in the ethereal series, 
ready to become actual upon the advent of 
the requisite stimulus, — the death of the 
outer body. The ethereal body, of course, 
is not affected by any of the agencies that 
operate to injure or destroy masses of our 
matter. Neither sword-blade nor bullet can 
divide it, the weight of all the seas cannot 
crush it, closest sealing cannot confine it. 
The ethereal body knows not the hurts of 
the material. 

I do not see, therefore, why any organic 
individual should ever die. I do not think 
one ever does. Simply, when the death 
transformation overtakes it, and the material 



160 Beside the New-Made Grave 

body drops away, the next more tenuous body, 
flowing free, takes on new beauty as the new 
adjustment arises between it and the psychic 
energies released from their previous associa- 
tion. I am glad to feel, in my own mind, 
an assurance that this is so. It softens the 
tragedy in the fate of all those lowly, beauti- 
ful creatures which brighten yonder forest 
with their life and shadow it with their death. 

Now, do not jump at the conclusion that I 
claim immortality for the brute as well as for 
the man. By no means. An organism may 
be deathless without having achieved immor- 
tality in the Christian sense of the word. 
In that sense, immortality becomes possible 
only with the evolution of a being capable 
of carrying into the life beyond, that mem- 
ory of the previous life essential to the pres- 
ervation of his individual identity. It is evi- 
dent, therefore, that the individual's change 
from world to world may be many times ef- 
fected before the evolution of true immor- 



Beside the New-Made Grave 161 

tality is reached. It certainly is not reached 
by terrestrial organisms which have not at- 
tained self-consciousness, — organisms lower 
than man, — nor, so far as our present ex- 
perience enables us to judge, by organisms 
in realms infra-terrestrial. Personally I have 
no doubt that 

" The soul that rises with us, our life's star, 
Hath had elsewhere its setting 
And cometh from afar." 

But of those experiences afar we have no 
more recollection than a butterfly has of its 
chrysalid existence. Clearly, then, thus far 
in our series of worlds, the capacity for 
immortality has not been reached by any 
creature lower than man. 

But that in man Nature has achieved this 
crowning triumph, there seems good reason to 
believe. It is not life alone which she has 
brought to light through protoplasm, but im- 
mortality as well. For protoplasm, contin- 
ually differentiating into plasm adapted to 



1 62 Beside the New-Made Grave 

ever higher and higher uses, has at length, 
in the brain of man, achieved an apparatus 
capable of doing a two-fold work : first, of 
preserving a sustained and associated record 
of the sequence of changes it has undergone 
in the course of the self-conscious life of the 
individual, and second, of effecting so intimate 
a union with the finer brain included within 
it that the records imprinted in its own sub- 
stance are imprinted likewise in the substance 
of that finer brain ; thus securing to man 
that memory of his earthly experience essen- 
tial to the continuance of self-conscious indi- 
viduality beyond the tomb. 

And thus we reach, at length, the recon- 
ciliation between the soul's immortal life and 
its dependence upon brain activity. Let me 
briefly summarize what I have said. The liv- 
ing individual is alive clear through, not only 
actually through his material body, but poten- 
tially through the series of ethereal bodies 
included within the material body and asso- 



Beside the New-Made Grave 163 

dated in some mysterious way with it. Death 
is the ceasing of the material body to respond 
to the material environment ; and when the 
response of the material body to the material 
environment ceases, the response of the next 
ethereal body to the next ethereal environment 
begins. In the human type, the evolution- 
ary process has produced a brain-substance 
so delicate as to be capable of effecting a 
union with the more tenuous substance it 
includes, such that the finer brain receives 
and retains the records made in the cells of 
the grosser by that continuous sequence of 
transformations of energy concomitant with 
the continuous sequence of states of con- 
sciousness which we call the soul. Hence, 
in the death transformation, when the poten- 
tial life of this finer brain becomes actual 
through the falling away of the material 
body, there is no break in consciousness ; 
for death, in its main feature, is simply the 
readjustment of the soul to the physical 



1 64 Beside the New-Made Grave 

activities of the newly living brain, and in 
the substance of this newly living brain is 
imprinted that record of the individual's 
terrestrial life - experience which secures to 
him the continuance of his conscious indi- 
viduality. Hence the uninterrupted wave of 
psycho - physical activity — or soul — flows 
continuously on in the more tenuous world 
as it flows on from day to day in this ; and 
thus the immortal being moves consciously 
onward through successive tenuities of matter 
toward infinite freedom in the One Energy 
which transcends matter. 

" O death, where is thy sting ! O grave, where is thy vic- 
tory ! " 

It is because I feel assured of the sub- 
stantial truth of this hypothesis, that I bid 
you hope for your son an eternity of ever 
broadening life. To his development have 
gone ages of patient toil on Nature's part ; 
that noble and beautiful personality was never 



Beside the New -Made Grave 165 

attained in twenty years or twenty centuries ; 
and to suppose it to have been attained only 
to be destroyed is to insult the Cosmic Mind. 
The thinking man — that exquisite adjust- 
ment of physical and psychic energies — is 
Nature's highest achievement. Having ef- 
fected it, she is too good an economist to 
leave it, tremblingly unstable as from the 
delicacy of its poise it must be, to the mercy 
of every chance disturbance. A very slight 
impulse suffices to disturb that delicate poise 
and bring about the swift and sudden trans- 
formation of energy which we call death; 
we may be sure, therefore, that, in the death 
transformation, Nature has provided, not an 
agent for the destruction of her precious 
product, but a most effective means for its 
higher evolution. 

To our human comprehension the death 
transformation is a mystery. When its gray 
shadow falls upon the face of our beloved, we 
know in our desolation only that the heart 



1 66 Beside the New-Made Grave 

has ceased to beat, the brain to thrill. That 
is to say, we behold the material phenomena 
which accompany the transformation, the 
flowing away of the released physical en- 
ergies into other modes of motion. But the 
change itself we behold not ; the glorious 
revolution by which, at the touch of the in- 
ducing cause, the psychic energies flash into 
readjustment to the finer forms of physical 
energy in the next tenuity of matter, and the 
transformed being stands forth, radiant in 
the new robes of his greatened individuality 
— this we do not see, and so we weep as 
those who have no hope. 

Be of good cheer, my friend. Your son is 
indeed dead to this world, yet hath he life in 
the world to come, and shall have it ever 
more abundantly, that so the will of God 
may be fulfilled in him. 

And more ; I bid you hope for a renewal 
of the sweet companionship which death has 
broken. For as to pass from one world to 



Beside the New-Made Grave 167 

the world adjacent, though doubtless a great 
change in conditions, cannot be to enter upon 
a totally different sphere of life, so neither 
can the individual who makes the transition 
become, in the instant of transformation, an 
altogether new being. He has, when death 
overtakes him, arrived, through age-long 
processes of evolution, at a certain level of 
life-value, and that level cannot be greatly- 
altered in an instant of time. Hence he 
must continue his development substantially 
as he would have continued it had he re- 
mained in our world; and since, among the 
new conditions awaiting us in the next tenuity, 
we may reasonably expect a lengthened life- 
span to be one, you will, presumably, enter 
upon the next sphere before your son is 
ready to pass on. And so you will see 
him again ; and should your death be a few 
years deferred, you will find him grandly ful- 
filling the noble promise of his young man- 
hood. You may not stand to each other in 



1 68 Beside the New-Made Grave 

the old relation, for it may be that relations 
of the flesh die with the flesh ; but in so far 
as you and he were spiritually akin, that kin- 
ship will assert itself in worlds having higher 
spiritual possibilities than ours, and you will 
know him, and commune with him, and love 
him, in the world that is to come. 

" There is no death ! What seems so is transition ; 
This life of mortal breath 
Is but the suburb of the life elysian, 
Whose portal we call death." 

The poet's vision may, however, be a little 
too deeply rose-tinted. I hardly believe con- 
ditions in the next world can be so different 
from conditions here as to make life in that 
world in any sense elysian. Nature, I repeat, 
makes no leaps. Not all the steps leading up 
to the unseen world are revealed to us, but 
we have a tolerably clear view of the eighty 
years next preceding, and we certainly do not 
discern therein enough of the elysian to justify 
us in expecting elysian conditions in the near 



Beside the New-Made Grave 169 

future. Our life on earth is a discipline, in 
which the bitterness of toil and conflict, 
defeat and pain and loss, is mingled in large 
measure with the honey of gladness. It is 
through suffering that perfection comes ; and 
which of us is perfect ? No, we must look 
forward to the life beyond, as, like this, a 
discipline, nor expect surcease of sorrow till 
sorrow's work is done, and in the peace of 
God that cometh with perfection, her blessed 
ministry shall end. 

I do not see how there can be any com- 
munication between the inhabitants of differ- 
ent worlds, because I do not see how there 
can be any relation of perceiver and perceived 
between an observer of one tenuity and an 
environment of another. Moreover, I am 
sure that had there been any such possibility, 
my own dear ones who have passed on would 
have drawn near to me and given me some 
blessed intimation of their presence, espe- 
cially in the first agony of parting. They 



170 Beside the New-Made Grave 

never have, therefore I think they never 
could. It is possible, probable indeed, that at 
the instant of transition, when the response 
to the material environment is just ceasing 
and the response to the ethereal just begin- 
ning, there may be a transient phase of dual 
response, when both worlds are present in 
consciousness at one and the same time. 
This would account for that flash of recog- 
nizing joy which sometimes lights the faces 
of the dying as the death-shadow falls. They 
see again the dear ones they have yearned 
after through all the years, and great peace 
comes with the vision. 

Let us, then, dear friend, await with serene 
confidence our swiftly coming change ; for we 
know that when our earthly house of this 
tabernacle is dissolved, we have a building of 
God, a house not made with hands, eternal 
in the heavens. 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: August 2005 

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